A globally recognized thought leader and entrepreneur, Robert combines high academic standards with on-the-ground practitioner experience. He is committed to mobilizing hard data and solid evidence to generate lasting social impact. Ranked as a top tier political scientist by research.com, Robert has an h-index of 52 and an i100index of 206. For more than two decades he has worked in some of the world’s most challenging settings in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe to promote inclusive urbanization, responsible crime prevention, more effective stability and peace operations, smarter migration policy, and the design and deployment of open and accountable gov-tech and civ-tech.
Robert co-founded the SecDev Group to drive digital transformation and reduce cyber threats around the world. As a principal, he leads the firm’s work on digital harms, climate security and digitally secure cities. He also co-founded the Igarapé Institute – an award-winning global think and do tank focused on citizen, digital, and climate security. A co-founder of Bioverse – a forest intelligence start-up – he is also a senior adviser to McKinsey’s Group and sits on the board of several technology start-ups. Robert has worked with dozens of national and city governments, technology companies like Google, Meta, Uber, and YouTube and international agencies such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank to help them scale success. He has also won awards for producing evocative data visualizations and predictive platforms to track city fragility and resilience, climate mobility, and promote AI safety and ethics.
The recipient of several academic and humanitarian awards, Robert is (or has been) either faculty or an invited fellow at the University of Princeton, Singularity University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Oxford, the University of San Diego, the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Switzerland. In 2010, he co-founded the Stability Journal and serves on the editorial boards of several prominent scholarly journals. Between 2000-2010, Robert was the research director of the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey. Since then, Robert has edited, authored or contributed to dozens of books and peer-review articles. He regularly contributes to annual United Nations Human Development Reports, World Bank Development Reports, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Reports, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Fragility Reports, and other flagship publications.
