[2][3][4] She sits on the board of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture[5] and the Advisory Committee for the Intentional Spaces summit convened by the International Arts+ Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins Medical School.
She is the author of Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism (2001), and Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (2017), which the Salk Institute's Terrence Sejnowski says lays "the groundwork for a cognitive neuroscience of architecture."
[7] Williams’ American Land Planning Law (Chicago, 1975) was cited repeatedly in the landmark Mount Laurel case in New Jersey, for which he filed an amicus curiae brief on the part of the plaintiffs.
[9][10] Her undergraduate degree in English and American Literature (minor in Art History) is from Brown University[11] (class of 1982), where she studied with William Jordy, and Johanna E. Ziegler, both of whom became important mentors.
As the New Republic's architecture critic, she published one of the earliest essays to call attention to the deplorable state of America's hard infrastructure ("American Collapse", 2007); an essay on the role of public/private partnerships in the aesthetic shaping of new urban parks ("Park Here", 2010); and critical assessments of work by, among others, Santiago Calatrava, Rem Koolhaas, Enrique Miralles, Jean Nouvel, SANAA, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Peter Zumthor.