William B. Grant has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley (1971). He had a 30-year career in laser remote sensing of atmospheric constituents including 15 years at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. During his time in Virginia, he learned how to conduct ecological studies while investigating the role of acid rain and ozone on eastern oak and hickory forests. He turned to cancer in 1999 after obtaining a copy of Atlas of Cancer Mortality Rates in the United States, 1950-94 and seeing that rates for many types of cancer were very high in the northeastern states and very low in southwestern states. He obtained the NASA map of solar UVB doses for the U.S for July 1992 and showed strong inverse correlations between UVB and mortality rates for about 13 types of cancer, building on the seminal work by Cedric and Frank Garland. He retired from NASA in 2004 and moved to San Francisco where he formed Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center to work on health studies full time. His goal was to do research to show which aspects of diet caused various diseases and how raising vitamin D levels could lower risk of many types of disease, having realized that the US medical system was designed to treat rather than prevent disease. In April 2020 he published the first article suggesting the likely role of vitamin D in reducing risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19. He has also published several papers regarding vitamin D supplementation recom