Dr. Robert M. Goodman, a plant biologist and virologist by training, is an expert on soil microorganisms and plant disease. Since 2005, he has served as Executive Dean of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Rutgers University, leading both the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station.
He studied at the Johns Hopkins University and then transferred to Cornell University, where he earned a B.S. degree in Plant Sciences in 1967. After two years of civilian service, he completed a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology at Cornell University in 1973. He was awarded a NATO postdoctoral fellowship by the National Science Foundation for study in molecular virology at the John Innes Institute in Norwich, England. In 1974, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and later promoted to Associate Professor in 1978 and Professor in 1981.
In 1982, Goodman was named Vice President, and thereafter Executive Vice President, for Research and Development at Calgene, Inc., an early plant biotechnology company and one of the pioneers in the genetic engineering of crop species, notably pesticide resistance and the use of anti-sense RNA to modify crop traits.
From 1991 to 2005, he was a professor of plant pathology and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his laboratory carried out pioneering work on the diversity of soil microorganisms refractory to cultivation and co-developed the approach for microbial biology studies now widely called metagenomics.
He is widely published in scientific journals such as Science, Nature, Virology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on topics including soil metagenomics, the discovery of the geminiviruses, and characterization of unexpected Archeal and Eubacterial clades in soil.
Goodman has served in several senior leadership positions, including the Board of Trustees of the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT), founder and chair of the McKnight Foundation’s Collaborative Crop Research Program, and chair of the Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources section of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS).
He is an elected Fellow of the AAAS and of the American Academy of Microbiology.
