[2] From 2010 to 2012, he was a member of the Theory Group of IBM Almaden Research Center.

[3] Williams has been a member of the program committee for the Symposium on Theory of Computing in 2011 and various other conferences.

He won the Ron V. Book best student paper award at the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity in 2005 and 2007,[4] and at the best student paper award at the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming in 2004 from the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.

[6] Complexity theorist Scott Aaronson has called the result "one of the most spectacular of the decade".

[8] Ryan is married to Virginia Vassilevska Williams, also a theoretical computer scientist.