Message from Dr. Deborah Bruner, Senior Vice President for Research at Emory University
Dear Members of the Emory Community,
I am pleased to announce that Dr. Robert Nobles will join our community as Vice President for Research Administration, effective December 1st, 2019.
Dr. Nobles joins Emory after serving as the Interim Vice Chancellor for Research & Engagement and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Tennessee. While at the University of Tennessee, Dr. Nobles functioned as their chief research officer and chief compliance officer, while providing strategic leadership for research development, funding, strategic investments, proposal development, grants/contracts negotiations and support, research communications, core facilities, research informatics, research safety, and research integrity. He also served as the chair for the institutional compliance and campus safety committees. Nationally, Dr. Nobles serves on the board of directors for Public Responsibility for Medicine & Research, and is a member of the executive committee for the Federal Demonstration Partnership.
During his career as an administrator and active health outcomes researcher, Dr. Nobles secured more than $30 million in public health grants in his role as PI, Co-PI, from a diverse pool of funders including: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); Houston Endowment; Harris County Public Health Department; City of Houston Health Department; National Institutes of Health; Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth, and Families – Family and Youth Services Bureau; AETNA Foundation; U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice & Delinquency Prevention; and Texas Health and Human Services Commission.
Nobles also served as a public health faculty member and as the research compliance officer at both Texas A&M University and the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. Before that, he was a public health prevention specialist for the CDC, and a program manager for the state of Florida’s Department of Public Health. He has taught 25 discrete courses and educated more than a thousand undergraduate and graduate students at seven institutions on the collegiate level since 2001. Courses instructed have included program evaluation, epidemiology, public health policy and administration, responsible conduct of research, public health program development and measures of effectiveness, health policy, healthcare management, healthcare law and ethics, systems in healthcare, healthcare strategies, healthcare finance, public administration, voting and elections, policy making process, anatomy and physiology, biology, and environmental biology.
Nobles earned his Doctor of Public Health degree at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston with a triple major that included health policy and management, epidemiology, and health economics; and he received his Master’s degree in public health specializing in epidemiology, and a Bachelor of Science in molecular biology from Florida A&M University.
Please join me in warmly welcoming Dr. Nobles to the Emory community.
Sincerely,
Dr. Deborah Bruner, RN PhD, FAAN
Senior Vice President for Research
