Colonel Jeffrey Williams is a retired United States Army officer and NASA astronaut. He completed a graduate program in aeronautical engineering and was subsequently selected for an Army assignment at the Johnson Space Center, where he served in various capacities supporting the Space Shuttle Program. In 1992, Colonel Williams attended the Naval Test Pilot School, graduated first in his class, and subsequently served as an experimental test pilot and Flight Test Division Chief in the Army’s Airworthiness Qualification Test Directorate at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He retired from active duty with the U.S. Army in 2007 after more than 27 years of service and logging approximately 3,000 hours in more than 50 different aircraft. During the course of his career, he was selected as an astronaut in 1996 and completed four space flights in his 25+ years with NASA.

His first space flight was on the shuttle Atlantis in May 2000 during the early construction phase of the International Space Station (ISS). Williams later flew three six-month tours on the ISS in 2006, 2009-10, and 2016, launching each time on a Russian Soyuz rocket. His space flight experience included five spacewalks, hundreds of experiments across the spectrum of applied science, commanding the ISS twice, and accumulating a record-setting time in space of 534 days.

Colonel Williams has a Master of Science degree and Degree of Aeronautical Engineer from the Naval Postgraduate School (1987), a Master of Arts degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College (1996), and a Doctor of Ministry from The Master’s Seminary (2021). He also received honorary doctorates from Johnson and Wales University (2007), Grove City College (2018), and the University of Messina in Italy (2019). He and his wife, Anna-Marie, reside in Washington State.