Mark Williams biography

Mark Williams is a board member of the AAP and webmaster for this website.

As a postgraduate student at CERN he wrote data acquisition software and found conclusive evidence for a rare 'electromagnetic penguin' decay of the b quark. He also shared a flat with one of Tim Berners-Lee's colleagues as they created the World Wide Web, but was completely oblivious to the fact.

In 1998, with a PhD in Particle Physics but zero experience of web design, he was employed by Stanford University to redesign the BaBar collaboration's website, which had become huge, disorganised and impenetrable.

On being awarded a Royal Society of Edinburgh Enterprise Fellowship in October 2000 and a DTI SMART award in 2002, he finally left academia to set up a company. He also garnered a masters degree in New Venture Creation.

In late 2005 his own company finally became profitable but he decided to move on to bigger and better things with a partner company, taking his management team with him.

Mark is Chief Information Architect for Extrasys, a leading provider of managed services for data and applications, and is co-founder of Surfability.