Damon S. Williams
For pioneering entrepreneurship and leadership in the water industry, including the areas of municipal drinking water, wastewater and recycled water; for serving as a visionary trailblazer and inspirational role model for African Americans in environmental engineering; and for financial support, mentorship and career assistance to underrepresented minority students in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Managing Member, DSW Water Strategies, LLC
- BS, Civil Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1978
- BS, Physics, Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois, 1969
Damon S. Williams is the Managing Engineer of DSW Water Strategies, LLC, a firm specializing in providing high level consulting services to municipalities, Federal, state and local agencies, utility districts, water districts, private water companies, universities, municipal and industrial water and wastewater treatment operators and other consultants in the water industry.
He is the former founder and Chief Executive of Damon S. Williams Associates, LLC, a firm which, for 23 years, specialized in planning, design, research, construction administration, and start-up and commissioning of major water resource recovery and water treatment facilities in the Western United States.
In his four-decade career, Damon has played a key role in water infrastructure planning, design and development for numerous major municipalities across the country. He has performed major projects, many of them award-winning, for predominant water agencies in Arizona, California, Texas, Oregon and Nevada. Damon has played a key role in addressing water scarcity and sustainability issues throughout the arid Western United States. He contributed significantly to the implementation of water reuse and water recycling in numerous projects, including the innovative and award-winning Tres Rios Environmental Restoration Project-Flow Regulating Wetlands, for the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the City of Phoenix. He has helped design more than a dozen recycled water treatment facility projects during his career, most involving biological nutrient removal (for Nitrogen and Phosphorus), and some involving Indirect Potable Reuse (IPR).
He is a Registered Professional Engineer in seven states, as well as a licensed water and wastewater treatment plant operator in two states. He is a Board-Certified Environmental Engineer (BCEE) of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists and is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He is a Life Member of AWWA and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). He has authored or co-authored numerous technical papers and he has presented at numerous state and national industry conferences.
Damon established the Damon S. Williams Scholarship in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering to provide scholarships to promising minority graduate students who are studying environmental engineering. He was honored as a Distinguished Alumnus by Grainger Engineering’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Alumni Association in 2004.
Current as of March 2022