Background
McRobbie, Michael Alexander was born on October 11, 1950 in Melbourne, Australia. Son of Alexander Hewitt and Joyce Victoria (Gair) McRobbie.
academic administrator educator computer scientist
McRobbie, Michael Alexander was born on October 11, 1950 in Melbourne, Australia. Son of Alexander Hewitt and Joyce Victoria (Gair) McRobbie.
Bachelor with honors I, University Queensland, 1974. Doctor of Philosophy, Australian National University, 1979. Doctor of Science (honorary), University Queensland, 2007.
Doctor of Science (honorary), Sung Kyun Kwan University, 2008.
He became the eighteenth president of Indiana University on July 1, 2007. His early work was in philosophy, artificial intelligence and automated theorem proving. After a postdoctoral fellowship in philosophy, he founded an automated reasoning project, the ANU Centre for Information Science Research and the Cooperative Research Centre for Advanced Computational Systems.
From 1990 through 1996 he was a professor at the Australian National University. He had a growing interest in international research collaborations. In 1996 he and Kilnam Chon proposed what became Asia Pacific Advanced Network at a symposium held at Tsukuba, Japan.
In 1997 he became the vice president for information technology at Indiana University. The network operations center for the Abilene Network was established at IU under his direction, and the Pervasive Technology Laboratories were established with a $29.9 million grant from the Lilly Endowment in 1999. McRobbie was principal investigator of a project sponsored by the US National Science Foundation to connect US and Asian national research and education networks called TransPAC. The state-funded $5.3 million I-Light project connected all campuses of the IU system with fiber optic communications (further expanded in 2010).
In 2003 he became the vice president for research of IU. In 2005, the TransPAC2 project was funded as a follow-on to TransPAC. He was chairman of the steering committee for the Indiana Metabolomics and Cytomics Initiative (METACyt), which was the largest outside funded project in the history of Indiana University Bloomington. McRobbie served as interim provost and vice president of academic affairs of the Bloomington campus in 2006. He increased external funding by securing millions of dollars in grants for life science initiatives.
On a July 2006 trip through China he established a cooperative research program with Tsinghua University in Beijing. By September 2006, the previous president of Indiana University, Adam Herbert, announced he wanted to leave office before July 2008. On March 1, 2007 McRobbie was selected as IU's 18th president and took office on July 1, 2007.
He served on the board of directors for ChaCha (the Indiana-based search engine). Some press were critical of a deal that used IU library staff as "guides", although McRobbie resigned from the board before becoming president of the University. McRobbie was made a Sagamore of the Wabash, the highest honor the state can bestow, in 2007 by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.
That same year he received an honorary degree from the University of Queensland. In 2008 he received an honorary degree from Sungkyunkwan University in Korea, and one from the Australian National University in 2010. McRobbie was served on the board of trustees for Internet2 since 2009, and was named chair of the board starting in 2012.
In 2012 he announced a new supercomputer called Big Red II at IU. Although other universities operate larger computers, by some measures this Cray XK7 was expected to be the largest for use by a single US university and not a consortium or national resource. The original Big Red computer was installed in 2006. She was executive director of member and partner relations for Internet2, and an adjunct faculty member in IU’s School of Informatics.
Member of Australian Academy Humanities (honorary fellow 2007), Skyline Club, Columbia Club, Commonwealth Club, University House.
Married Andrea Shirley Gibson, December 22, 1973 (deceased 2003). Children: Josephine Elizabeth Joyce, Lucien Richard Vernon, Arabella Diana Grace. Married Laurie Lucile Burns, August 7, 2005.
Children: Carol Charles Burns Gray, Margaret Burns Gray.