Who was this Samuel Wells Williams character, anyway?

I awoke to an email from the chair of the East Asian Studies Council this morning. In my rather dazed state it took a while to figure out what it was telling me, but the bottom line is yours truly is one of the two recipients of this year's Williams Prize in East Asian Studies at Yale! (The selection pool is papers written by seniors in the current year on any Chinese, Japanese, or Korean subject.)

I wrote my advisor, feisty emeritus professor and modern Taiwanese/Chinese historian/historiographer Beatrice Bartlett, with the news. Her reply--as always, she's not one to mince words!--said simply:

Congratulations! That's great! Now - the prize was named for Samuel Wells Williams. Do you know who he was?!?

A good question indeed. I wikipedia-ed the prize's namesake and found the following:

Samuel Wells Williams (衛三畏;22nd September 1812-1884) was linguist and diplomat of United States of America. He was born in Utica, New York and studied at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. On graduation he was elected as a Professor of the Institute. On the June 15, 1833, and still in his Twenties, he sailed for China to take charge of the Printing Press of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions at Guangdong, China. In 1837 he sailed on the Morrison to Japan. Officially this trip was to return some stranded Japanese sailors, but it was also an attempt to open Japan to American trade. On November 20 1845 he married Sarah Walworth. From 1848 to 1851 Williams was the editor of the Chinese Repository, a leading Western journal published in China. In 1853 he was attached to Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry expedition to Japan. In 1855 he was appointed Secretary of the United States Legation to China. In 1860 he was appointed chargé d'affaires for the United States in Beijing. He resigned his position on October 25, 1876, 43 years to the day that he first landed at Guangzhou in 1833. He wrote A Tonic Dictionary Of The Chinese Language In The Canton Dialect (英華分韻撮要) in 1856. He returned to the United States of America in 1877 and became the first Professor of Chinese in the United States at Yale University.

Wow. After reading that, I feel doubly honored...and feel doubly unworthy. But a big, heartfelt xiexie/arigato to everyone who helped me along the way. I would've gone crazy without you!