Roger John Williams (August 14, 1893 – February 20, 1988), was an American biochemist. He is known for is work on vitamins and human nutrition. He had leading roles in the discovery of folic acid, pantothenic acid, vitamin B6, lipoic acid, and avidin. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1946, and served as the president of the American Chemical Society in 1957. In his later career he spent time writing for a popular audience on the importance of nutrition. Early life and education Roger John Williams was born in Ootacamund, India of American parents on August 14, 1893. His family returned to the US when he was two years old, and he grew up in Kansas and California. He attributed his early interest in chemistry to the influence of his brother Robert R. Williams, eight years his senior, who was also a chemist. Robert is remembered for being the first to synthesize thiamine (vitamin B1). Roger was an undergraduate at the University of Redlands and received his bachelor's degree in 1914. He received a teaching certificate from the University of California, Berkeley the following year and began work as a science teacher in California. After a year of teaching, he decided to return to school and began graduate work at the University of Chicago, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1919. His Ph.D Thesis was entitled The Vitamine Requirements of Yeasts. Julius Stieglitz was the chairman of the department of chemistry at U Chicago when Roger Williams was a student there, and Williams later described Stieglitz as a major influence upon him in organic chemistry. Academic career Williams began his academic research career by joining the faculty at the University of Oregon in 1920. During the following twelve years he spent there, he discovered pantothenic acid. In 1932 he moved to Oregon State College and in 1939 he moved again to the University of Texas at Austin. He founded and became the founding director of the Biochemical Institute (later the Clayton Foundation Biochemical Institute) in 1940 with funding from Benjamin Clayton. Williams' research program was notable in that he used yeast as model organisms to study nutritional requirements, on the hypothesis that the underlying cellular biochemistry was generalizable from yeast to animals. He aimed to study vitamins, at the time known as animal nutrients whose chemical properties were not characterized. This approach was successful in