Dr Robert E Williams (born 1940), US astronomer and Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore, USA. Williams was educated at Berkeley, California and Madison, Wisconsin. His research, specialising in spectroscopy, led to Professorships at London and Tucson, and the Directorship of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Williams was appointed Director of the STScI in 1993, where he now oversees the science programme of the Hubble Space Telescope. He is seen here against the Hubble Deep Field, an extremely long exposure of the sky which reveals many previously unknown distant galaxies. Photographed in 1996.