Dr. Timothy Williams has been teaching global child protection at Boston College School of Social Work since 2015. His research interests focus on the systems that perpetuate inequalities and the experiences of those affected, particularly children. Since 2022, he has been consulting for UNICEF, providing technical support to strengthen child protection systems, with an emphasis on children affected by forced migration and displacement.

He has authored and co-authored over 70 academic articles, reports, and book chapters in the fields of education, child protection, and health. This work has been published in The Washington Post, The New England Journal of Medicine, World Development, and Comparative Educational Review, among others. He has also written think pieces for The Brookings Institution, Center for Global Development, and The World Bank. In 2023, he wrote an influential report on the consequences of urban warfare on children for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

His notable research also includes a decade-long study on education policy in Rwanda, earning him the 2020 Dudley Seers Prize for best paper in The Journal of Development Studies and the 2018 Joyce Cain Award from the Comparative and International Education Society of North America.

Timothy earned a Ph.D. in international development from the University of Bath, an MSc in public health from Harvard, and an MSW from Boston College. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and served as an honorary research fellow with the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre at the University of Manchester.