Rate My Professor Joe Williams

Joe Williams is Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department at Illinois Wesleyan University, a position he has held as department chair in recent years. He joined the faculty in 1999 and was promoted to full Professor in 2023. Williams earned his B.S. from The University of Utah, M.A. from The Johns Hopkins University, and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. His academic background has equipped him to teach courses in general psychology and behavioral neuroscience while leading research initiatives in psychobiology.

Williams' research centers on neuroscience, encompassing biological and neural mechanisms of physical and social pain, the roles of the hippocampus, amygdala, and frontal lobes in learning and memory, effects of alcohol on cognitive functions, and psychobiological effects of pulsed radiofrequency on pain-regulatory gene expression. He investigates hippocampal/frontal EEG relationships with memory and the frontal lobes' role in processing social ostracism using electroencephalography techniques. Williams has co-authored peer-reviewed publications, including 'Pulsed Radiofrequency Modulates Pain Regulatory Gene Expression Along the Nociceptive Pathway' and contributions to studies on the Peripheral Muscarinic Dysafferentation theory of neuropathic pain and interventional procedures for chronic pains. He has mentored dozens of undergraduate research projects resulting in conference presentations, such as 'Theta Reset and Working Memory in Humans: An EEG Study' (2003), 'Frontal Midline Theta as an Index of Emotional Modulation in Working Memory' (2012), 'The Effects of Social Ostracism on Frontal Midline Theta' (2008), 'Efficacy of a Cocaine-Schizophrenia Model in Rats' (2011), and recent works on spinal cord stimulation for analgesia and differential target multiplexed programming (2023–2025). Williams chairs the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, serves on the Institutional Review Board, and received the Ames Library Open Education Exploration Grant in 2021 to advance open educational resources in psychology.