RJR Experience and Expertise
Robbins holds BS, MS, and PhD degrees in the life sciences. He served
as a tenured faculty member in the Zoology and Biological Science
departments at Michigan State University. He is currently exploring
the intersection between genomics, microbial ecology, and biodiversity
— an area that promises to transform our understanding of the
biosphere.
Robbins has extensive experience in college-level education: At MSU he
taught introductory biology, genetics, and population genetics. At
JHU, he was an instructor for a special course on biological database
design. At FHCRC, he team-taught a graduate-level course on the
history of genetics. At Bellevue College he taught medical
informatics.
Robbins has been involved in science administration at both the
federal and the institutional levels. At NSF he was a program officer
for database activities in the life sciences, at DOE he was a program
officer for information infrastructure in the human genome project. At
the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, he served as a vice
president for fifteen years.
Robbins has been involved with information technology since writing
his first Fortran program as a college student. At NSF he was the first
program officer for database activities in the life sciences. At JHU
he held an appointment in the CS department and served as director of
the informatics core for the Genome Data Base. At the FHCRC he was VP
for Information Technology.
While still at Michigan State, Robbins started his first publishing
venture, founding a small company that addressed the short-run
publishing needs of instructors in very large undergraduate classes.
For more than 20 years, Robbins has been operating The Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project,
a web site dedicated to the digital publishing of critical works in
science, especially classical genetics.
Robbins is well-known for his speaking abilities and is often called
upon to provide keynote or plenary addresses at international
meetings. For example, in July, 2012, he gave a well-received keynote address at the
Global Biodiversity Informatics Congress, sponsored by GBIF and held
in Copenhagen. The slides from that talk can be seen
HERE.
Robbins is a skilled meeting facilitator.
He prefers a participatory approach, with
part of the meeting involving dynamic breakout groups, created by the
participants in real time: (1) individuals propose breakout groups;
(2) everyone signs up for one (or more) groups; (3) the groups
with the most interested parties then meet, with reports from each
group presented and discussed in a subsequent plenary session.
Robbins has been engaged with photography and design since the 1960s,
when he worked for a professional photography laboratory. He now
prefers digital photography and tools for their precision and
reproducibility. He designed his first web site more than 20 years
ago and he personally designed and implemented this web site.
He engages in graphic design as a hobby.