Bill joined the University of Bath in October 2014 and became head of the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies in August 2015. He previously held posts in Canada and in Singapore, as well as at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom and in the War Studies Group of King’s College London where he coordinated a large, inter-institutional and interdisciplinary ESRC funded project under the New Security Challenges programme.

In September 2014, Bill was officially invested as a visiting professor to the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong (CELAP) in Shanghai – one of China’s four, top-level ‘Party Schools’. He has also been an associate fellow of the International Security Programme at Chatham House (Europe’s leading think-tank) in London for almost a decade.

Bill was educated at Imperial College, the London School of Economics and New College Oxford, receiving his PhD through the Centre for Decision Analysis and Risk Management of Middlesex University. His main research interest is to examine the causes and consequences of contemporary perceptions of risk, as well as how these are framed and communicated across a range of issues relating to security, science and society.

His publications are world-leading and cited by senior figures in key international institutions (UN, WHO, OSCE, EU, MOD, etc). They appear in top-rated journals and on the reading lists of some of the world’s highest-ranked universities, including Harvard, Sciences-Po and University College London.

In 2013, he contributed to a US Joint Chiefs of Staff and Department of Defense White Paper assessing counter-terrorism policies in the light of recent incidents in the US and the UK. His 2012 paper on the 2011 riots across England has been used to inform the Chinese government’s Crisis Management Lab training courses at CELAP in Shanghai. His 2011 paper on the World Health Organization’s response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic is the second most-cited on risk communication in the WHO’s 2013 Biannual Review of Public Health Research on Influenza.