APS Member Honored for Intelligence

APS member Dwight Williams has been elected one of the first Director of National Intelligence fellows.

The DNI Fellows Awards program recognizes and rewards outstanding technical achievement within the Intelligence Community. 

Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte presented the first DNI Fellows Awards to nine members of the Intelligence Community at a ceremony in February. “These distinguished experts are the best of the best–professionals in whom we have enormous trust and confidence,” said Negroponte, “As globalization spreads technology to the far corners of the globe, the Intelligence Community’s S&T leaders must devise ways to maintain our competitive advantage.”

A $200,000 research grant is awarded to each Fellow to perform government intelligence technology research.

DNI Fellows are nominated by the science and technology organizations of the Intelligence Community and selected annually by the Office of the Associate Director of National Intelligence for Science and Technology. They are chosen based upon their outstanding technical contributions, the expectation of significant technical advances based upon their track record of achievement, and the potential for the DNI fellowship to facilitate subsequent technical work and collaboration across the Intelligence Community.

Dwight Williams serves as the Principal Nuclear Physicist in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Science and Technology Brain Trust within the Directorate for Measurements and Signatures Intelligence (MASINT) and Technical Collection. He earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Nuclear Engineering from North Carolina State University and his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Maryland.

He said he felt honored to receive the DNI Fellows award. “I was actually kind of humbled by it,” he said.