Pro Vice-Chancellor &
(Research Strategy)
Pro Vice-Chancellor &
(Research Strategy)
Robert Saint is currently Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research Strategy) at The University of Adelaide and a standing member of the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC).
He gained his undergraduate, honours and PhD degrees from the University of Adelaide, studying gene structure and expression in the earliest days of recombinant DNA technology. He was a Research Fellow at Stanford University for three years, supported by CSIRO and Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowships, working on the genetic regulation of animal embryonic development.
On returning to Australia in 1982, he worked at the Walter and Eliza Hall Inst. and CSIRO before moving to the University of Adelaide in 1989, where he pioneered research into cell cycle control during animal development.
In 1994 he was appointed Professor of Genetics at the University of Adelaide and was Head of the Dept. of Genetics from 1994 to 1999. He served on the ARC Biological Sciences Panel from 1995-1997 and was an ARC Special Investigator from 1997-1999.
From 2000-2008 he was Director of the ARC Special Research Centre for the Molecular Genetics of Development (CMGD), which began at the University of Adelaide before expanding into the ANU following Professor Saint’s move there in 2002 to take up the position of Professor of Molecular Genetics and Evolution at the ANU Research School of Biological Sciences.
In 2009 he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne. He was elected a Member of the Asia-Pacific International Molecular Biology Network and has been awarded the Julian Wells Medal of the Lorne Genome Conference, the MJD White lectureship of the Genetics Society of Australia and the President’s medal of the Aust. New Zealand Society for Cell and Developmental Biology. He was a member of the ARC College of Experts (2008-2010) and in 2009 was Chair of the ARC Biological Science and Biotechnology panel.
From 2009-12 he was a member of the Human Frontier Science Program Grant Review Panel and currently serves on an NHMRC Grant Review Panel. He is also an author of the only Australian tertiary education level Biology text book.
His research, which is supported by ARC and NH&MRC funding, focuses on the genetic and molecular regulation of cell behaviour during animal development using Drosophila as a model organism.