Robert graduated with a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree, and a Doctoral Degree (Ph.D.) also in Public Health from the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine within the University of Utah School of Medicine. He later graduated with a Master of Social Work (MSW) degree still from the University of Utah, and then completed a 2-year Post-doctoral training within the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine.
Motivated by his interest to study health disparities in under-served populations, he engages in projects that recognize substance use and mental health as greater public health concerns. His current research interests include promoting smoking cessation among vulnerable populations such as psychiatric inpatients with substance use problems, including opioid misuse. He also investigates possible predictors of readmission in psychiatric inpatient facilities. He hopes that identifying such predictors can assist in the development and implementation of interventions to improve community health issues, and substance use disorders among the understudied population of individuals with psychiatric illness.
In addition to his smoking cessation work in the US, he works in refugee camps in the West Nile region of Uganda in East Africa, where most of the refugees are from the Congo, and Sudan. His work in the refugee camps extends to understanding humanitarian work, improving community health, and treatment of mental health and substance use among the refugee and surrounding non-refugee populations. His approach is guided by principles of community-based participatory research. He enjoys to play games such as ultimate frisbee with school-age children whenever he can during his study abroad sessions in the refugee camps.