Professor Robert Saint

Robert Saint commenced as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Flinders University in 2015. 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 Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University and NHMRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research. He then worked at the 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 from 2000-2008 he was Director of the Australian Research Council Special Research Centre for the Molecular Genetics of Development, 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.

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 has been a member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts, served on NHMRC Grant Review Panels and the Human Frontier Science Program Grant Review Panel.

From 2012 to 2014 he was a standing member of the Prime Minister’s Science Engineering and Innovation Council. His research focuses on the genetic and molecular regulation of cell behaviour during animal development.

In 2017 Professor Saint became a Member of the Order of Australia.