Ray Williamson is an optical engineering consultant with concentration in optical fabrication, metrology, and polarization optics. He has worked hands-on as an optician on a broad range of materials, sizes, and configurations – in both prototype and production quantities – and has trained many opticians. He has worked as process engineer, quality manager, and engineering manager, at Spectra-Physics, Coherent, Los Alamos, Laser Power, and VLOC.

He is a voting member of the Optical and Electro-Optics Standards Committee representing U.S. interests to ISO, board member of the Florida Photonics Cluster, member of SPIE (an international society for photonics), OSA (Optical Society of America), and APOMA (American Precision Optics Manufacturers Association). He has published over twenty papers on optical fabrication and testing, and is Optical Manufacturing and Testing Conference Co-Chair for SPIE. He is the author of the SPIE Field Guide to Optical Fabrication.

In the last nine years he has supported himself through consulting services to the precision optics community, which has included two formal training programs under grant; one for Florida and one for New York.