Meet Dr. Andrew B. Williams
Assistant Provost for Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Dr. Andrew B. Williams is the inaugural Assistant Provost for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at The Citadel, 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 is 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 a tenured Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Previously, Dr. 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, and he secured $83.6 million for a new 120,000-square-foot engineering building. He also championed The Citadel’s selection as a Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) partner campus, one of approximately 70 KEEN institutions nationally and the only one in South Carolina, securing $250,000 in Kern Family Foundation support to embed entrepreneurial mindset learning across the engineering curriculum and to fund faculty development open to colleagues campus-wide. Four Citadel faculty have since been named national Engineering Unleashed Fellows.
His leadership and engineering career spans industry and higher education, including roles at Apple, GE Medical Systems, Boeing, and Allied Signal, and academic appointments 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 and the Charles E. and Mary Jane Spahr Professor. Earlier in his career he founded and led the ARTSI Alliance, a multi-institutional robotics research and education initiative spanning eight Research I universities and 11 HBCUs, and the international RoboCup SpelBots team.
A nationally recognized voice on AI in higher education, Dr. Williams is an AWS Education Champion and 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 a long-standing commitment to broadening participation in engineering and computing. He is the author of A is for Agent: An Illustrated Guide to AI (2026) and Out of the Box: Building Robots, Transforming Lives (2009).