Swanlund Endowed Chair: Gene E. Robinson

Gene E. Robinson joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989 and is the University’s G. William Arends Professor of Integrative Biology. He is the director of the University of Illinois Bee Research Facility, director of the Neuroscience Program, theme leader at the Institute for Genomic Biology, and a professor of entomology with affiliate appointments in the Departments of Cell and Developmental Biology, Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, and Animal Biology, and in the Beckman Institute of Science and Technology. Dr. Robinson obtained his Ph.D. in entomology from Cornell University in 1986. He pioneered the application of genomics to the study of social behavior, led the effort to gain approval from the National Institutes of Health for sequencing the honey bee genome, and heads the Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium. He is also the author or co-author of over 200 publications,

Dr. Robinson has been honored as a University Scholar, Fulbright Fellow, and Guggenheim Fellow. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the US National Academy of Sciences.