Robert J. Jones took office as the 34th president of the University of Washington on Aug. 1, 2025. He holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. Prior to leading the UW, Jones served as chancellor of Illinois’ flagship university, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and prior to that as president of the State of New York University at Albany (SUNY Albany). He is a distinguished scholar whose research focuses on crop physiology, and he has served in leadership roles in national academic organizations and the Big Ten Conference.
Jones served for nine years as the 10th chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the state’s largest and flagship land-grant university. He was previously chair of the board of directors for the Association of American Universities (AAU), board chair of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and chair of the Big Ten Council of Presidents and Chancellors.
At Illinois, Jones led the university in establishing a bold new vision of the land-grant university for the 21st century and beyond, while honoring the institution’s long history of achievement. Under his leadership, the university completed a $2.7 billion philanthropic campaign, the largest in its history. Jones also oversaw the launch of the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, the first accredited engineering-based medical school in the world. During his nine years as chancellor, he grew the university’s enrollment by 25%. He also significantly expanded the Illinois Commitment, a program that guarantees four years’ free tuition to state residents with family incomes less than $75,000, making the university’s founding promise of an accessible and affordable world-class college education the centerpiece of his administration.
During Jones’ tenure, the university’s research enterprise became a central component of Illinois’ efforts to build an infrastructure for innovation and discovery. He was selected by Governor J.B. Pritzker to co-chair the Innovate Illinois partnership to coordinate the state’s efforts to secure critical federal research investments, and he led the university in being selected for multiple high-profile research partnerships. Under Jones’ leadership, the university was also recognized as the state institution best positioned to convene public and private partnerships and collaborations to solve problems that are too large and complex for any single institution to address alone. He also served for more than a decade as a consultant to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s South African Education Program, designed to educate Black South African students in American universities to help advance the nation post-Apartheid.
A Georgia native, Jones is a first-generation college student who earned a bachelor’s degree in agronomy from Fort Valley State College, a master’s degree in crop physiology from the University of Georgia, and a doctorate in crop physiology from the University of Missouri–Columbia. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy and the Crop Science Society of America. He began his academic career in 1978 as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota, where he spent more than three decades as an internationally respected authority on plant physiology and a nationally recognized university administrator. For more than 30 years, Jones also recorded and performed with the Grammy-award winning choral ensemble The Sounds of Blackness.
Jones is married to Dr. Lynn Hassan Jones, M.D., a muscular skeletal diagnostic radiologist. Together they have five children and a growing number of grandchildren.