Ian Williams has been Professor of Theoretical Organic Chemistry at the University of Bath since 1995. He has many years’ experience in the application of computational methods to the study of problems in physical organic chemistry. Born in Bournemouth, England, he studied at the University of Sheffield and gained his PhD under the supervision of James McKenna. He then spent two years in Richard Schowen’s laboratory at the University of Kansas, five years as a Royal Society Pickering Research Fellow at Cambridge in the sub-group of Theoretical Chemistry, and four years as an EPSRC Advanced Fellow in Bristol. Since his first appointment at Bath in 1989, he has taught physical organic and computational chemistry to all years of the Chemistry programmes and is currently a Director of Studies. His research uses computational modelling and simulation as tools to aid the interpretation of experimental observations, and he has published on a broad range of topics from atmospheric chemistry to enzyme mechanisms. A past Chair of the Royal Society of Chemistry Theoretical Chemistry Group and UK representative on the EuCheMS Division of Computational Chemistry, he now serves on the IUPAC Subcommittee on Structural and Mechanistic Chemistry, which has responsibility for the ICPOC international conferences on physical organic chemistry, and he chaired ICPOC21 in the UK. He is no relation to the other Co-Editor of Advances in Physical Organic Chemistry!