Ron Williams, PhD
Open Works Board Member
Baltimore, Maryland Area
I’m a board member at Open Works in Baltimore, Maryland and the Urban Manufacturing Alliance where I serve as president-elect and incoming board chair. The majority of my career has been in higher education, 25 years of which have been on the faculty of Coppin State University College of Business. I served as principle investigator on the "Turning Makerspaces into Greater Places" research project, a comprehensive assessment of Open Works operations and economic impact (Free downloads of the study are available at https://www.greaterspacesandplaces.com/). Our 2019-2020 research agenda was altered due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We began with the development of an instrument to assess institutional trust associated with the maker movement. We pivoted and wrote “A Makerspace’s Rapid Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Open Works in Baltimore, Maryland.”