William J. Palm III is Professor of Mechanical, Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Rhode Island. In 1966 he received a B.S. from Loyola College in Baltimore, and in 1971 a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Astronautical Sciences from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

During his forty-two years as a faculty member, he has taught nineteen courses. One of these is a junior system dynamics course, which he developed. He has authored nine textbooks dealing with modeling and simulation, system dynamics, control systems, vibrations, and MATLAB. These include Introduction to MATLAB for Engineers, third edition (McGraw-Hill, 2011), A Concise Introduction to MATLAB (McGraw-Hill, 2008), and Differential Equations for Engineers and Scientists (McGraw-Hill, 2013) with Yunus Çengel. He wrote a chapter on control systems in the Mechanical Engineers' Handbook , fourth edition, (M. Kutz, ed., Wiley, 2014), and was a special contributor to the fifth editions of Statics and Dynamics, both by J. L. Meriam and L. G. Kraige (Wiley, 2002).

Professor Palm's research and industrial experience are in control systems, robotics, vibrations, and system modeling. He was the Director of the Robotics Research Center at the University of Rhode Island from 1985 to 1993, and is the co-holder of a patent for a robot hand. He served as Acting Department Chair from 2002 to 2003. His industrial experience is in automated manufacturing; modeling and simulation of naval systems, including underwater vehicles and tracking systems; and design of control systems for underwater vehicle engine test facilities.