Robert started in Genomics by building robots to process DNA back in 1993. He moved on to bioinformatics where he helped assemble genomes including those of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Campylobacter jejuni, Yersinia pestis and Plasmodium falciparum. He also wrote software which processed over a third of the sequencing reads that went into the Human reference genome. More recently he's been working on SAMtools and HTSlib, and actively participating in the GA4GH standards process.