Bill received his undergraduate degree from Clemson University and his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from Princeton University in 1967. He then worked in the fusion energy program at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In the mid-1970s, he joined the fusion office of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission during a time of rapid expansion of the U.S fusion effort. Bill became Chief of the Open Confinement Systems Branch in the Division of Controlled Thermonuclear Research (DCTR). That branch primarily oversaw the Magnetic Mirror research effort at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

Bill was a leader and proponent within the DCTR for pursuing magnetic mirrors more aggressively in order to compete with the primary tokamak systems approach to fusion. Under his direction a multi-hundred-million dollar magnetic mirror facility called MFTF-B was reviewed, approved and constructed at LLNL.

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission evolved into the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and then into the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). As MFTF-B construction was winding down in 1983, Bill left the DOE to become Associate Director of Research at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC. As he was leaving, DOE presented Bill with its Bronze Medal for Exceptional Service, "for his initiative and diplomacy which have led to worldwide recognition of key technical issues and have resulted in more efficient utilization of international mirror research efforts." In 1989, while at NRL, Bill received a Presidential Senior Executive Service Award citing his "career achievements in the management and execution of research and development programs of national importance".

In the early 1990s, Bill left NRL to become a vice president of Ebasco Services in New York City. Ebasco later merged with Raytheon Engineering and Constructors and Bill served with Raytheon as Vice President and Chief Scientist throughout the 1990s. During the 1990s, Bill continued to be active in fusion matters, serving as chair of the U.S. ITER Industry Council and a member of Fusion Power Associates Board of Directors.

Bill was in his Ebasco office on the 89th floor of the North World Trade Center building in New York on February 26, 1993 when a group of terrorists set off a truck bomb in the parking garage in hopes of bringing down the building. On September 11, 2001, Bill was 2 blocks away from the Trade Center at Case University when the towers were struck by aircraft and brought down.

Bill and his wife Carol, whom he married in 1991, had a townhouse about a mile north of ground zero.

Bill contributed an essay to Chapter 12 (Perspectives 2012) in the book Search for the Ultimate Energy Source, authored by Stephen O. Dean (Springer, ISBN 978-1-4614-6037-4, 2013). In it he states, "The decline of U.S. industry participation in the fusion energy program should be a matter of great concern to all of us. It wasn’t supposed to be that way." He opines he hopes "to help your readers understand how shortsighted some of our government's high-level decisions have been in science and technology (S&T) areas, including fusion, and what negative effects some of these decisions have had on industry and on the researchers involved."

Those who knew and worked with Bill mourn his passing.