Robert Duncan, Ph.D.

Robert Duncan, Ph.D, serves as the Vice Chancellor for Research, and as a Professor of Physics, at the University of Missouri (MU).  He was born and raised in St. Joseph, MO, where he attended Central High School. He went on to complete his S.B degree in physics at MIT, and then his Ph.D., also in physics, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He then joined Sandia National Laboratories where he earned the rank of Distinguished Member of Technical Staff prior to joining academia in 1996. He has served as a Visiting Scientist at the National Institute for Standards and Technology, as a Professor of Physics at the University of New Mexico, as the Gordon and Betty Moore Distinguished Scholar on the visiting physics faculty at Caltech. Most recently Duncan served as the Director of the New Mexico Consortium’s Institute for Advanced Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory prior to joining MU in 2008. He is a Fellow and a life member of the American Physics Society. He and his wife, Dr. Annette Sobel live in Columbia, Missouri.