Robert P. Erickson received his Bachelors degree from Reed College in 1960 and his Medical degree from Stanford University School of Medicine in 1965. He was a participant in the five year program at Stanford University that allowed additional time for research. Dr. Erickson's research training continued after his pediatric internship and residency. His military time was spent at NIH where he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Christian B. Anfinsen (Nobel laureate) at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Disease as a research associate. These two years were followed by a year serving as an NIH fellow at the National Institute of Medical Research in Mill Hill, London, where Dr. Erickson worked with N. Avrion Mitchison in Cellular Immunology. He returned to the United States in 1970 to perform his fellowship in Pediatric Genetics with Dr. Charles J. Epstein at the University of California, San Francisco, where he stayed on the faculty as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Erickson left the University of California, San Francisco via a Guggenheim Fellowship at the Institute Pasteur, where he worked in the laboratory of Dr. François Jacob (Nobel laureate), a Mammalian Developmental Geneticist. He then went to the University of Michigan as an Associate Professor in 1976 and advanced to the rank of full Professor in Human Genetics in 1980 and in Pediatrics in 1982. Dr. Erickson was recruited to the University of Arizona in 1990 as the Holslaw Family Professor of Human Genetics and Inherited Diseases. While at the University of Arizona, he has played a major role in the cloning of three single disease genes, one of importance to the Arizona population – a gene involved in a disease limited to the Apache and Navajo called Athabaskan Brainstem Dysgenesis. Dr. Erickson is the author of over 300 research articles, clinical case reports and scientific reviews and editor, co-editor or co-author of 4 books. He is a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fullbright Grant in Aid, an Eleanor Roosevelt International Cancer Research Fellowship, a Fogarty Senior International Fellowship, a Wellcome Research Travel Grant; and was the first honorary visiting fellow of Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge. He has served on the NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee and its Human Gene Therapy Sub-Committee. He has also served on the organizing committees of multiple international meetings and as an officer at various national organizations. He was appointed by Governor Napolitano in 2008.