Martin Williams is Adjunct Professor in Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He has worked with archaeologists in the Sahara, Nile Valley and Ethiopia, and has written over two hundred research papers and a dozen books, including Climatic Change in Deserts (Cambridge, 2014), A Land Between Two Niles (with Donald Adamson, 1982) and The Sahara and the Nile (with Hugues Faure, 1980). He received the Farouk El Baz Award for Desert Research from the Geological Society of America in 2008.