Dr. William "Bill" Godnick was appointed as the WJPC Dean of Academic Affairs in June 2024. He joined the Perry Center in 2016 as a Professor of Practice spearheading academic offerings on the Strategic Implications of Human Rights and the Rule of Law as well as contributing to courses on Strategy and Defense Policy, Combating Transnational Threat Networks and Caribbean Defense and Security. During his time at the Perry Center he has also supported to efforts of the US Southern Command through the Human Rights Initiative and advised the governments of Barbados and the Dominican Republic on the development of defense and national security strategies. He has taught graduate and undergraduate students at the American University School of International Service, the Catholic University of America, Barry University, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and California State University Monterey Bay.

Prior to joining the Perry Center, Dr. Godnick served for nearly a decade as Public Security Program Coordinator for the United Nations Regional Centre for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean based out of Lima, Peru covering all countries of the region. Previously, Dr. Godnick worked as a Senior Policy Advisor for Latin America with the London-based NGO International Alert working on the role of the private sector in peacebuilding and conflict-sensitive business practices and human rights in the oil and mining industries in Colombia and Guatemala. He began his career in the early 1990s as a Peace Corps volunteer working on small business development in a small community outside of San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

Dr. Godnick holds a BS in International Business from San Francisco State University (1992) and an MA in International Policy Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (1997). In 2010, he completed his PhD from the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom. His doctoral dissertation was titled "An examination of the impact of voluntary weapons collection programs on citizen security in Latin America." He serves on the editorial advisory committees for the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Ecuador) and the Colombian Association of Criminology.

Dr. Godnick has lived in the Bahamas, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Peru and worked in more than 20 countries of the Western Hemisphere. His research interests are varied in the fields of national security and grand strategy, defense, governance, public security, transnational threats and human rights. He is fluent in Spanish.