2023 - Robert Colombo
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Description
Dr. Robert Colombo earned his Bachelor of Science degree at the State University of New York, Syracuse. He came to Illinois to study the Zoology of Fish at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale and stayed. After earning his M.S. and PhD. at SIU-C, Dr. Colombo headed up I-57 to Charleston to join the faculty of Eastern Illinois University, where he has pursued his distinguished career for almost 15 years.
Dr. Colombo has been wildly prolific in his research. Since joining EIU in 2009, he has published 37 peer-reviewed manuscripts with 26 of those manuscripts containing EIU student coauthors. publishing research on everything from the size of the population of fish in the Wabash River to the effects of climate change on the DNA of bluegill sunfish, from the presence of invasive fish species in Illinois to how to estimate the age of fish. He has been awarded over four million dollars in external funding and has earned four Achievement and Contribution Awards for Research. He was the 2012 and 2022 recipient of the Edwin L. “Bud” May Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research and Grants.
Dr. Colombo also won an Achievement and Contribution Award in service in 2013, and he continues to provide exemplary service to his department, the University, the field of Fisheries Biology, and the community. He has chaired or served on many faculty search committees within the department of Biological Sciences as well as a variety of other departmental committees; he is the faculty advisor for three student organizations. At the university level, Dr. Colombo has served on the Enrollment Management Committee, the Achievement and Contribution Awards Committee, Institutional Athletic Board, and the Council on Faculty Research among other committees. He has been on both the American Fisheries Society (Illinois Chapter) Environmental Concerns Committee and the Esocid Technical Committee (which focuses on the study of Pike and other related types of fish) for over 10 years. Dr. Colombo developed an age and growth workshop for Catfish 2020 the international ictalurid symposium and in 2022 he was the Keynote speaker at the Mississippi River Research Consortium in Lacrosse, Wi. For the community, Dr. Colombo has conducted outreach programs taking the field of the biology to high schools around Central Illinois by developing biology research programs twice a year.
On top of it all, Dr. Colombo has not neglected teaching. He has been awarded the Rodney S. Ranes Outstanding Graduate Faculty Mentor Award and the College of Sciences Student Advisory Board Outstanding Faculty Award. Dr. Colombo teaches a very large and diverse list of courses over the years, including courses (such as Human Anatomy or Endocrinology) that fall outside his field of expertise. Many of his students have won awards from EIU as well as at the state, regional, and national levels.
Dr. Robert Colombo certainly is a distinguished member of the Eastern Illinois University faculty and is well deserving to be acknowledged as such with the Distinguished Faculty Award!
Publication Date
2023
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Publisher
Eastern Illinois University
City
Charleston, IL
Keywords
Distinguished Faculty Award
Recommended Citation
Faculty Senate, "2023 - Robert Colombo" (2023). Distinguished Faculty Award. 11.
https://thekeep.eiu.edu/distinguished_faculty_award/11
