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By Phil Williams
First-time visitors to Gregory Robinson’s office on South Campus might be forgiven for thinking they are in the wrong building. Robinson doesn’t exactly look like a chemistry professor. At 6-feet 2-inches tall and weighing 245 pounds, he resembles the top-flight football player he was two decades ago at Alabama’s Jacksonville State University.
But make no mistake. Robinson is one of the top young chemists in America. His name exploded on the world of chemistry in 1997 when he and colleagues in his laboratory reported the first evidence of a new bonding procedure between atoms of the element gallium, a silver-white metal whose compounds are sometimes used as semiconductors in the computer industry. He and his team reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society the synthesis and characterization of the first “gallyne,” a new organometallic compound containing a gallium-gallium triple bond.
The shock waves from that discovery had barely faded when the Robinson lab announced another discovery: the synthesis of a compound composed of a new way to bond iron and gallium. The two reports drew support as well as skepticism from chemists worldwide, but evidence is growing that the work in Robinson’s lab was not only correct but also path-breaking.
Robinson’s excitement when he speaks of his work is palpable, but he also seems somewhat amazed at how far his career has come since he was a boy growing up with three older sisters and two younger brothers in the tiny town of Alexandria, Ala.
“Neither of my parents went to college, but my grandfather, Walter Lee Howard, did attend college in Tennessee,” says Robinson. “He was a very learned man.”
In his first few years as a student, Robinson attended segregated schools. After the schools were integrated, Robinson found quickly that his size and speed made him a highly acclaimed athlete. He played quarterback on the Alexandria High School football team and was excellent at basketball, too. Even though his ACT score was marginal, he knew that he wanted to attend college, and he realized early that his main interest lay in science. He left for Jacksonville State in 1976.
Playing football and majoring in chemistry was a strain, but Robinson found that he responded well to the challenge, and by the time he had graduated in the spring of 1980, he had not only been selected conference defensive player of the year but had received honorable mention on the UPI All-American football team as well.
“I really didn’t have a master plan for my future at that time, but when I was a senior, a chemistry professor from the University of Alabama--Dr. Jerry Atwood--came to our campus to speak on some aspects of aluminum chemistry, and I was really taken with his work,” says Robinson.
So it was off to a new university for graduate work. After earning his doctoral degree in 1984, his next move was not clear at first, for chemists in industry do challenging work and earn superb salaries. But Robinson felt a clear calling to teaching and university-based research.
So in 1985, he accepted a position as an assistant professor of chemistry at Clemson University. He rose through the academic ranks to full professor at Clemson in 1995 and came to UGA four years ago.
While Robinson has worked hard to achieve excellence in his fields, he is very aware that relatively few African Americans enter academic chemistry.
“I read an article several years ago that stated of the 1,600 students awarded Ph.D.s in chemistry in the United States that year, only 16 were African Americans,” he says.
“I clearly have an opportunity to tell students that with determination and perseverance they can go a long way.”
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