Associate Professor, Organizational Studies
About
Martin Williams is an Associate Professor in Organizational Studies and (by courtesy) Political Science at the University of Michigan.
His research is on the politics and management of policy implementation, public service delivery, and bureaucratic reform. His book, Reform as Process: Implementing Change in Public Bureaucracies, is under contract with Columbia University Press and due out in 2025. He also teaches and researches on the challenges of causal inference, external validity, and applying evidence in government decision-making.
Williams was formerly an Associate Professor in Public Management at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, and Research Fellow at Green Templeton College. At the Blavatnik School, he served as academic co-director of the People in Government Lab and co-research director of the DeliverEd (delivering education reforms) project.
From 2022-23, he was on sabbatical as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.
Prior to joining Oxford University, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College London, Department of Economics, and completed his PhD in the Government Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He previously worked as an economist in Ghana’s Ministry of Trade and Industry as an Overseas Development Institute Fellow and was a Senior Researcher at the Economic Policy Research Institute in Cape Town. Williams also hold MSc degrees in African Studies and Economics for Development from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Economics from Williams College.
