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William H. Robinson is the Vice Provost for Academic Advancement and Executive Director of the Provost’s Office for Inclusive Excellence, and is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Vanderbilt University. He also works to advance the Provost’s priorities focusing on faculty recruitment, retention, and development; student success; curriculum; and a culture of respect, dignity and care.

Robinson served on the Chancellor’s Committee on Diversity, Inclusion and Community, and he was the recipient of a Chancellor’s Award for Research on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in 2016 for his work to broaden minorities’ participation in engineering, which has significantly informed the understanding of factors that often discourage Black scholars from pursuing academic careers.

Robinson joined the Vanderbilt University faculty as an assistant professor after earning a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University.

Robinson’s research explores the hardware and software tradeoffs to improve system performance, system reliability, and system security. He leads the Security and Fault Tolerance Research Group at Vanderbilt, whose mission is to design, model, verify and implement robust computing systems that positively benefit stakeholders with consumer, defense, industrial and medical applications. He also co-leads the Explorations in Diversifying Engineering Faculty Initiative (EDEFI) (pronounced “edify”). EDEFI investigates the institutional, technical, social, and cultural factors that affect the decision-making, career choices, and career satisfaction for doctoral students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty who have been marginalized by race and/or gender.