Robert Edwards

Professor Edwards received a PhD in 1994 from the University of Sussex in England studying the regulation of nitrogen fixation in Klebsiella pneumoniae. As a PostDoc at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA, Edwards studied the regulation of expression of virulence factors in the E. coli, and then in a second postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Edwards was one of the first to use genomics to understand the subtle genomic differences that allow closely related Salmonella strains to cause vastly different types of disease in humans and our farm animals. Edwards continued this work as an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Health Sciences Centre in Memphis, TN, and then was recruited to Argonne National Laboratory to develop the popular RAST and MG-RAST pipelines for annotating bacterial genomes and metagenomics, respectively. In 2006 Edwards started as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Biology at San Diego State University, California, USAS and rose through the ranks to become a Full Professor with Tenure. In 2020, Edwards moved to Australia to take the position of Matthew Flinders Professor of Bioinformatics and director of the Flinders Accelerator of Microbiome Exploration (FAME) at Flinders University in South Australia