Mason L. Williams received a B.S. in Engineering in 1964 from the California Institute of Technology, and the M.S.E.E. degree in 1966 and a PhD in Electrical Engineering with Physics minor in 1970 from the University of Southern California where he studied under Professor Jan Smit.

In 1970, Dr. Williams joined IBM in San Jose, California, initially in a Manufacturing Research department. In his first year he was assigned to work with R. Larry Comstock on characterization and testing of experimental magnetite film media. That collaboration led to the so-called “Williams-Comstock” analytical model of digital magnetic recording. In 1982, he joined the Magnetic Recording Institute and managed an investigation of perpendicular magnetic recording briefly. In 1985 he became manager of Advanced Recording Heads at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose. In that role he managed the development of micro-magnetic modeling for magneto-resistive head elements and the first building of spin-valve head test structures to verify biasing techniques. In 1992, Dr. Williams became the IBM representative to the Ultra-High Density Magnetic Recording Head project of the National Storage Industry Consortium, aimed at 10 Gb/sq in technology. In 1996, he became part of the Extremely High Density Recording Strategy Team at INSIC. In 1999, he was elected to the IEEE grade of Fellow. In 2001, he was selected as an IBM Master Inventor, and holds several recording head patents. At the end of 2002, Dr. Williams retired from IBM and joined Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. He worked on novel perpendicular head approaches and then focused again on recording physics and integration modeling until retiring from Hitachi in 2005.