Rob is the McFarland-Bascom Professor in Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his research focuses on information processing, machine learning, optimization and statistics. His award-winning work includes papers on sparse modeling, optimization, and statistical inference in networked systems.  He has supervised 18 Ph.D. students and postdocs who have gone on to positions at top universities and research labs.

Rob is a professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as being affiliated with the departments of Computer Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin.  He is also a Fellow of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and co-organizer of the SILO seminar series.