Ed Williams

Ed Williams joined ISOGG in 2005, a few months after the name of the organization was chosen. He has been active in genealogy since the 1980s, when state-of-the-art was a library that could send an image from microfilm directly to a networked printer. His fascination with DNA was cemented by a dinner with Francis Crick and James Watson when his university department sponsored a guest lecture. Yes; Ed is not a Millennial, or even an Xennial.

With a university background in biology (MS Biochem and recent post-grad refresher courses and labs in human genetics at the University of Houston), his first DNA population/ancestry test was with yDNA in 2002 for an academic study at the School of Biological Sciences, Washington State University. He's since tested with the original Genographic Project, Family Tree DNA (atDNA, yDNA, and mtDNA), AncestryDNA, 23andMe, MyHeritage, and has had 30X whole genome sequencing. He is a member of the National Genealogical Society, the American Society of Human Genetics, the International Society for Biomolecular Archaeology, the International Society for Computational Biology, and is a member of the advisory board of the Personal Genomics Foundation. He has two Guild-registered one-name studies, and admins or co-admins four FTDNA surname projects. Never having met a keyboard he didn't like (well, no full-sized keyboard, at least; his text messages are atrocious), he also has a sometimes-updated sort-of blog at CountingChromosomes.com.