Robert J. Jones became the 10th chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on September 26, 2016.
At Illinois, Jones serves as chancellor of the state’s flagship, land-grant university. Jones’ tenured faculty home is in the Department of Crop Sciences, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES). He is the first African American scholar appointed as Urbana chancellor in the institution’s history. He is the current chair of the Board of Directors for the Association of American Universities (AAU) and he chairs the Big Ten Council of Presidents and Chancellors.
At Illinois, he has led the university in establishing a new vision of the land-grant university for the 21st century, while honoring the institution’s long history of achievement. The university recently completed a $2.7 billion philanthropic campaign that was the largest in the university’s history and included two of the largest private gifts ever made to Illinois. Jones has implemented the vision of creating the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, the first engineering-based medical school in the world. The hiring of an inaugural vice chancellor for diversity, education and inclusion was a major step in fostering an even more open and collaborative community of students and faculty. And with the Illinois Commitment, a program that guarantees four years free tuition to state residents with family incomes less than $67,100, Jones has continued to deliver on the university’s founding promise of making a world-class college education affordable and accessible.
During his tenure, the university’s research enterprise has become a central component of the state’s efforts to build an infrastructure for innovation and discovery. He was selected by Governor J.B. Pritzker to co-chair the Innovate Illinois partnership to coordinate the state’s efforts to secure critical federal research investments that will put the state at the center of the industries that will define the 21st century. Illinois, in partnership with the University of Chicago, leads the $200 million Chicago Quantum Exchange initiative that is establishing the state the center of the quantum sciences and information in the nation. The university, in partnership with the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, was chosen to lead the $275 million Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago – an unprecedented initiative that seeks to redefine how we understand human biology. Under Jones’ leadership, the university has been recognized as the state institution that is best positioned to convene public and private partnerships and collaborations to solve problems that are too large and too complex for any single institution to address alone.
A Georgia native, Jones earned a bachelor’s degree in agronomy from Fort Valley State College, a master’s degree in crop physiology from the University of Georgia, and a doctorate in crop physiology from the University of Missouri, Columbia. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy and the Crop Science Society of America. He began his academic career as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota in 1978 where he spent more than three decades as an internationally respected authority on plant physiology and a nationally recognized university administrator.
Jones is married to Dr. Lynn Hassan Jones, MD, a muscular skeletal diagnostic radiologist. Together they have five children and a growing number of grandchildren.
