The next top dawg The next top dawg The next top dawg

In February, just a few days after being welcomed as the University of Washington’s incoming president, Dr. Robert Jones packed his overnight bag and headed to Seattle with his wife, Dr. Lynn Hassan Jones, for a whirlwind visit with students, faculty, staff and the local media. A seasoned university leader with 13 years’ experience helming two public research universities, he was prepared for an intense few days of visits, but maybe hadn’t bargained on a speedy golf-cart tour of the 703-acre campus in Seattle.

Last fall, Jones announced he was winding down his tenure as chancellor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, a land-grant state university with an undergraduate enrollment (37,000) similar to that of the UW’s campus in Seattle (36,000). During his nine years in Illinois, Jones positioned the university for the 21st century by helping launch the new Carle Illinois College of Medicine—the world’s first engineering-based medical school. He also helped complete the school’s $2.7 billion philanthropic campaign and grow a new technology and innovation partnership with the University of Chicago.

In announcing the hiring of Jones on Feb. 3, the UW Board of Regents said they were drawn by his background in academia as a research scientist, faculty member and leader in bridging the divide between university research and community outreach.

“Whatever you do, be the best at it that you can,” he recently told U of I students in a video interview. “We are all placed on this planet for a purpose, and I think that purpose is to do a greater good.”

Jones grew up in rural Georgia, and his family, who sharecropped, couldn’t afford to send him to college. He worked through high school to pay for at least the first two years at Fort Valley State College. He credits his mentors for his professional trajectory, starting with his parents and including a 9th-grade vocational ag teacher who affectionately called him “professor.” His college teachers pointed him to graduate school at the University of Georgia, where “two of the best scientists in the world” helped him launch his research career, he said. He went on to the University of Missouri for his Ph.D. Education was a means to an end so Jones could have a life that was better than what his parents experienced, he added.

As a plant physiologist at the University of Minnesota, Jones focused on environmental stresses during seed development in corn. There, after developing a successful research program and becoming a full professor, he shifted into academic administration, holding numerous roles starting in 1987 and culminating in the position of senior vice president for academic administration for the University of Minnesota System. In 2013, he was hired away to be president at the State University of New York at Albany. After four years there, he moved to the University of Illinois.

“His inspiring and barrier-breaking personal journey, highly regarded scholarship and decades of transformative leadership convinced us that Chancellor Jones is the ideal person to build upon President Ana Mari Cauce’s legacy,” said UW Regent Blaine Tamaki. “I believe he will lead us into our next chapter of providing educational excellence at scale, top-quality health care to all, regardless of need, transformative research and public service to the state of Washington and the world.”

Jones says he’s “beyond excited” to be joining the UW. “I am so deeply committed to the UW’s mission of partnering with communities so that more people can share in the benefits of university research and innovation.”

Jones will be the 34th president in the UW’s 164-year history.