Career
He pioneered the application of genomics to the study of social behavior and led the effort to sequence the honey bee genome. On February 10, 2009, his research was famously featured in an episode of The Colbert Report whose eponymous host referred to the honey Doctor Robinson sent him as "pharmaceutical-grade hive jive". After acquiring his bachelor"s in biology from Cornell University, Robinson went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy in entomology from Cornell in 1986.
He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1989.
Currently, Robinson is the Director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois and a Swanlund and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Entomology, with affiliate appointments in the Neuroscience Program, the Department of Cell & Developmental Biology, the Program in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Authoring or co-authoring over 250 publications, Robinson has made a wide range of fundamental advances in understanding the endocrine, neural, and genetic regulation of behavior at the individual and colony levels in honey bees.
His discoveries have significantly advanced the understanding of the role of genes, hormones, and neurochemicals in the mechanisms and evolution of social behavior. Robinson’s lab discovered the first gene known to be involved in regulating the bee colony’s famous division of labor, and in 2002 published this in Science.
The very next year, Robinson’s lab was the first to show that social information causes mass changes in brain gene expression, also publishing this in Science.
Robinson’s discovery on social regulation of brain gene expression has had a profound effect on understanding the roots of behavior. He developed a new paradigm to address the age-old “nature-nurture” problem, which was published in 2004 in an essay in Science and an Op-Editor in the New York Times. In October 2006, a collection of biologists, led by Robinson, successfully published the sequence of the honey bee Apis mellifera together with the Baylor Human Genome Sequencing Center (HGSC).
This discovery spurred an explosion of new bee research in molecular biology and genomics.
More recently, Robinson was part of a team that has discovered a plausible cause of colony collapse disorder, a malady that in 2007-2008 killed off more than one third of commercial honey bees in the United States. By analyzing differences in gene expression between healthy and infected honey bees, researchers learned that bees in charge-coupled device hives have unusually high levels of fragmented ribosomal Ribonucleic acid, a symptom of infection with multiple viruses.
