RICHARD SMITH
Some of the members of the Rhodes 2012 Great Moonbuggy Race at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL, left to right: Joey McPherson ’14, Vince Viola ’15, Morgan Smathers ’14, Brad Hensley ’12, Lars Monia ’15
biologist, had a significant interest in the physical sciences and encouraged my interest in Physics.” Once on campus, Robertson was under the watchful eye of professor Jack Taylor ’44, whom he credits for the good, solid department, and Professor Fritz Stauffer, who “was a significant player in the careers of all the graduates in my, and other, classes. He had a very complex life, and could draw on those experiences in guiding and advising students.” During Robertson’s college years, Physics occupied the basement of Kennedy Hall, the place where the major came alive for him. “For me, the big value in the Physics Department was the stuff we had to experiment with,” he says. “I did a number of experiments on my own, some of which were beyond the usual, it seems. I cannot imagine taking Physics and doing only the formalized laboratory experiments and not going beyond my own. It was the ‘going beyond’ that made me what I am today, I believe.” That “going beyond” propelled him to graduate school at Florida State University, where he was able to do a lot of instrument design work, the same kind with which he’s involved to this day. Robertson, a founder of NanoDrop Technologies, sold the company to Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2007.
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Under his leadership, NanoDrop pioneered microvolume instrumentation techniques that allow scientists to quickly and easily quantify and assess purity of small volume liquid samples such as solutions of proteins and nucleic acids. Not one to sit idle, though, he explains, “I’m supposed to be retired, but as I often put it, I’ve flunked retirement for the third time.” He has recently gone to work with another instrumentation company. A Rhodes trustee, Robertson has more than kept up with the sciences at Rhodes. In honor of one of his mentors, in 2005 he and his wife, Patricia, both members of the Benefactors Circle, established the Jack H. Taylor Fellowship in Physics. In addition, there is the Dr. Charles W. Robertson Jr. Endowment for Student Research and Engagement in Physics and a state-of-theart Zeiss Confocal Microscope System he provided the Biology Department. He stays in contact with science faculty, always dropping by to talk shop when he’s on campus. Grateful for his untiring support, in 2008, the college awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal. “It was very good for me to be pushed into the liberal arts studies; if I hadn’t been, I would have hung out in the world of science and engineering and shunned the liberal arts,” he says. “I think the breadth of the whole
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