Rate My Professor Hywel Williams

Professor Hywel Williams serves as Professor of Environmental Data Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Exeter, part of the Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy. He obtained his PhD in Complex Systems from the University of Leeds in 2006. After completing postdoctoral positions at the University of East Anglia in the departments of Environmental Science and Computer Science, and at the University of Oxford and the University of Exeter, he took up a lectureship at the University of Exeter in 2011 within Biosciences, focusing on systems ecology. In 2017, he moved to the Department of Computer Science as Lecturer in Data Science, progressing to his current professorial position.

Williams holds key leadership roles including Director of the Joint Centre for Excellence in Environmental Intelligence, a partnership between the University of Exeter and the Met Office, and Director of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Environmental Intelligence. He is an Alan Turing Fellow, leads the SEDAlab research group, and serves as a Visiting Fellow at Plymouth Marine Laboratory. His research employs complex systems approaches, data science, artificial intelligence, simulation, network analysis, and machine learning to tackle environmental issues such as biodiversity monitoring, climate change adaptation, sustainable food systems, social media analysis for environmental debates and natural hazards, collective attention in online discussions, and social biases in news consumption. Prominent publications encompass 'Network analysis reveals open forums and echo chambers in social media discussions of climate change' (Global Environmental Change, 2015), 'Student engagement and wellbeing over time at a higher education institution' (PLoS ONE, 2019), 'Coevolutionary diversification creates nested-modular organization in insect–microbe ecological networks' (Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2013), 'Using Social Media to Detect and Locate Wildfires' (AAAI Workshop on Computational Social Media, 2016), and 'Phage-induced diversification improves host evolvability' (BMC Evolutionary Biology, 2013). His scholarly output garners over 5,100 citations on Google Scholar, underscoring his influence in environmental data science.