Martin Williams is Adjunct Professor in Earth Sciences and Emeritus Professor at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He specialises in using evidence from a wide range of disciplines to reconstruct prehistoric environments and climatic changes in the drier areas of Africa, Asia and Australia. He has worked with teams of archaeologists in the Sahara, Nile Valley, Ethiopia, Kenya and India on habitats ranging from Neolithic to those occupied by early hominids. He has mapped soils in the Blue and White Nile Valleys and has investigated erosion and desertification in Australia, China and the southern Sahara. He is a recipient of the Cuthbery Peek Medal from the Royal Geographical Society, the Sir Joseph Verco medal from the Royal Society of South Australia, the Distinguished Geomorphologist medal from the Australian and New Zealand Geomorphology Group, and the Farouk El Baz Award for Desert research from the Geological Society of America. He holds a PhD degree from the Australian National University and a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Cambridge. He is author of more than two hundred research papers (twelve in Nature), and has edited or authored thirteen books. These include Climatic Change in Deserts (2014), Interactions of Desertification and Climate (with Robert C. Balling Jr., 1996), Quaternary Environments (with David Dunkerley, Patrick De Deckker, Peter Kershaw and John Chappell, 1993, 1998), The Sahara and the Nile (with Hugues Faure, 1980), and Landform Evolution in Australasia (with J.L. Davies, 1978).