Andrew B. Williams, Ph.D.

Assistant Provost for Innovation & Entrepreneurship

The  Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina 

Andrew B. Williams is the inaugural Assistant Provost for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, where he leads campus-wide initiatives at the intersection of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, advancing curriculum integration, faculty development, workforce readiness, and venture creation. He also serves as founding director of the $1M NSF-funded Center for AI, Algorithmic Integrity, and Autonomy Innovation (AI³) within South Carolina’s $20M EPSCoR ADAPT-SC project, and is a tenured Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Previously, Williams served as Dean of Engineering and Louis S. LeTellier Chair, providing academic, fiscal, and strategic leadership for five ABET-accredited undergraduate engineering programs and graduate programs in Mechanical, Civil, and Electrical Engineering and Engineering Leadership and Program Management. Under his leadership, The Citadel’s School of Engineering advanced from #21 to #14 in U.S. News & World Report rankings among non-doctoral undergraduate engineering programs. He served on The Citadel’s Fiscal Review Board, contributing to oversight of the institution’s approximately $120M operating budget.

As dean, Williams secured $83.6 million from the South Carolina State Legislature, private donors, and pledges for a new 120,000 square foot Engineering building currently in design, one of the most ambitious capital development efforts in the institution’s history, working alongside the president, provost, alumni, and donors to make it possible. He also led the collaborative development and implementation of a five-year School of Engineering Strategic Plan and championed The Citadel’s selection as a Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) partner campus.

Williams’ leadership and engineering experience spans industry and higher education, including roles at Apple, GE Medical Systems, Boeing, and Allied Signal alongside academic positions at the University of Iowa, Spelman College, Marquette University, where he held the John P. Raynor Distinguished Chair, and the University of Kansas, where he served as Associate Dean for the School of Engineering and as the Charles E. and Mary Jane Spahr Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Earlier in his career, he founded and led the ARTSI Alliance, a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary robotics research and education initiative spanning eight Research I universities and 11 HBCUs. He also held a Research Affiliate appointment at Georgia Tech and served on the Board of Trustees of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

A nationally recognized voice on AI in higher education, Williams is an AWS Education Champion, a Business Insider Cloudverse 100 honoree, and has served on the AWS Machine Learning University Advisory Board. His TEDx talk, “Belonging in Technology: What I Learned from Steve Jobs,” reflects his long-standing commitment to broadening participation in engineering and computing. He earned his B.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kansas, an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Marquette University, and an M.B.A. from Rockhurst University.