Professor Robert Saint AM

Professor Robert Saint is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Flinders University. 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.

Professor Saint was a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University in the US and an NHMRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne. 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, Professor Saint was appointed Professor of Genetics at the University of Adelaide and from 2000 until 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 AU following Professor Saint’s move there to take up the position of Professor of Molecular Genetics and Evolution in 2002.

In 2009, Professor Saint 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 Australia and New Zealand Society for Cell and Developmental Biology. He has been a member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts and served on the NHMRC and the Human Frontier Science Program Grant Review Panels.

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