He has received a Presidential Young Investigator award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Kellett Award, a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professorship, and a WARF Named Professorship for his research into the dynamics of star clusters, the evolution of stars and binary star populations. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, the American Physical Society and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Most recently he has been named a U.S. Fulbright Scholar. He has served as President of the Board of Directors of the WIYN Observatory, chair of the University Committee of UW-Madison, chair of the Department of Astronomy, and director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

Bob also has led national initiatives for the improvement of science higher education. From 1998 to 2000 he was the Associate Director of the National Institute for Science Education, and led the development of the Field-tested Learning Assessment Guide (FLAG) and other resources for science, engineering, and mathematics faculty. Thereafter he was the principal investigator of the Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) instrument for evaluation use by individual instructors, entire departments, and developers of new teaching and learning approaches. Since 2003 he has been the Director of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), a National Science Foundation Center for Learning and Teaching, focused on the preparation of science, engineering, and math graduate students for future roles as both forefront researchers and skilled teachers and communicators (www.cirtl.net). CIRTL is now a national network of 41 major research universities.