Mel Williams Jr. was appointed the inaugural senior associate dean for military and veterans initiatives at George Washington University in the nation’s capital. The university has a long history of serving veterans. The first student who used the original GI Bill enrolled at George Washington. Today, there are nearly 1,000 veterans and their dependents using GI Bill benefits at the university.
Williams is a retired vice admiral of the U.S. Navy where he was a nuclear submarine commander. As a fleet commander, he was in charge of 130 ships and 90,000 sailors and Marines. Most recently, he was associate deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Admiral Williams is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he majored in mathematics. He holds a master’s degree in engineering from the Catholic University of America. He is the coauthor of Navigating the Seven Seas: Leadership Lessons of the First African American Father and Son to Serve at the Top in the U.S. Navy (Naval Institute Press, 2011).
