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Speaker Biography

Kimberly J. Williams is the Chief Innovation Officer for the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County in Houston, Texas (METRO).

She leads METRO’s Autonomous Vehicle Proving Ground program and launched an AV Circulator service at Texas Southern University in 2019. Most recently she launched Phase II of METRO’s AV program, METRO FutureLink. The latest AV shuttle was made possible through a Federal Transit Administration (FTA), Accelerating Innovative Mobility (AIM) Grant. She represents METRO in the Automated Bus Consortium and, most recently, joined the Steering Committee of the FHWA Center of Excellence on New Mobility and Automated Vehicles.

Kim deployed public private partnerships to begin Wi-Fi on Transit and METRO’s new micro transit service, Curb2Curb. She is active in the Texas Innovation Alliance, Rice University’s Business Innovation Advisory Board and the Texas Advanced Air Mobility Advisory Committee. Active in the region’s energy transition, she authored the agency’s first climate action plan which received an award from the Federal Transit Administration during its climate action challenge.

Kimberly is a member of the American Public Transit Association’s (APTA) Board of Directors and Chair of the Procurement & Supply Chain Committee. She serves on the Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) Transportation Research Analysis Committee (TRAC) and the Transportation Cooperative Research Program’s (TCRP) Oversight & Project Selection (TOPS) Commission. Kimberly is a graduate of Leadership APTA, ENO’s Senior Transit Executive and Transportation 4 America’s Smart City Programs.

She is the proud mom of MacKenzie, a President’s Honor Roll student at Oklahoma State University, majoring in Finance.

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