WilliamsPhoto

I am an Assistant Professor of Geology at the University of Florida. Prior to joining the University of Florida, I was an Assistant Professor of Geology at Towson University, and a postdoctoral research associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. My research interests include the formation and preservation of physical and molecular biosignatures in terrestrial environments as an analog for putative biosignature formation on Mars. I have been a member of the NASA Curiosity rover science team since 2009, and I currently work with the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument team to explore the distribution of organic molecules on Mars’ surface. I have also joined the NASA Perseverance rover science team as a Participating Scientist. I have received several NASA group achievement awards for my work with the Curiosity rover team, received a nomination for the 2017 Maryland Academy of Sciences Outstanding Young Scientist Award, and was a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow.

My research focuses on the interaction between microbial life, the geochemical environment, and the rock record on Earth, and how to recognize habitable environments and potentially preserved microbial life on Mars and the outer world moons.

Amy Williams
amywilliams1@ufl.edu
352.273.1284
Department of Geological Sciences
270 Williamson Hall
1843 Stadium Road
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611

Black Lives Matter

In 2020, we witnessed another painful chapter in the long history of systemic racism and violence that has plagued our country since before we were a nation. The senseless murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others before them is a stark and horrifying reminder of the reality that Americans of color, and especially Black Americans, face in their daily lives. I share in the broken-heartedness and outrage that our community and country are experiencing.

The Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Florida affirms that we stand with all those in our department community, at UF, in Gainesville, in the state of Florida, throughout the United States and the world who continue to be tormented by the scourge of racism and injustice. We affirm our support for non-violent protests in our community. We affirm that black lives matter. We affirm that your stories, experiences, and emotions are real, and that they matter. We affirm that white privilege is real and that we live in an inequitable society, and that these facts must be confronted and faced head on. We affirm that we, as educators, scientists, and role models in the privileged halls of academia must use our positions to do more to combat the effects of systemic racism that pervade our institutions. We affirm that we as geoscientists, in one of the least diverse fields in STEM, must fundamentally change how we approach solutions to the lack of diversity in Earth and Planetary Sciences and the damage that it causes. And we affirm that at this moment in time, we must listen. We must listen to the voices of our friends, colleagues, and community members who have for too long been denied a seat at the table, who have been screaming into the void about the oppression that they have suffered, and how our actions or lack of actions perpetuate that suffering. We as educators must do the hard work to examine our own biases and actively fight racism. A good place to start is the Paleontological Society of America’s list of resources that explore racism, bias, and allyship in academia.

At the University of Florida, our motto is Civium in Moribus rei Publicae Salus, meaning The Welfare of the State Depends on the Morals of its Citizens. This statement calls all of us at UF to action in no uncertain terms. The Department of Geological Sciences is not only committed to supporting our students, staff, and faculty through this difficult time, but also to using our voices as geoscientists to educate others about the connections between climate change and social justice, and how they can be addressed. We support and endorse the statements by UF President Ken Fuchs and CLAS Dean David Richardson, and the personal testimony from UF Dean of the College of Arts Onye Ozuzu, and we recognize that affirmations such as those above are meaningless unless they are followed by real action. Diversity in all its forms provides strength, and only with that strength will we be able to tackle the many challenges that lie ahead.

I fully stand with the statement above, written by the faculty of the Geological Sciences department at UF. I updated my website in support of #ShutDownSTEM #ShutDownAcademia #Strike4BlackLives on June 10, 2020. On this day I publicly commit to educating myself about the struggles that Black Americans face, to being an effective ally for the Black Lives Matter movement, and to enabling real, actionable change that I can make as an individual in the academy. On the department level, we voted to remove the requirement for a GRE score to apply to our MS program (a change that is within our control) and voted to join other departments in our college to have this requirement removed for our Ph.D. applicants (this is controlled by the University, and this vote is the first step in pushing the University to remove the requirement). This is the first of many real actions my department and I are taking. I deeply believe that diversity in all its forms provides strength, and I commit to taking real action and supporting diversity in STEM, academia, and beyond.