After a postdoctoral fellowship in philosophy, he founded an automated reasoning project, the ANU Centre for Information Science Research and the Cooperative Research Centre for Advanced Computational Systems. McRobbie was a 1988 in Computer Science from to the . From 1990 through 1996 he was a professor at the Australian National University. He had a growing interest in international research collaborations. In 1996 he and Kilnam Chon proposed what became Asia Pacific Advanced Network at a symposium held at Tsukuba, Japan. In 1997 he became the vice president for information technology at Indiana University. The network operations center for the Abilene Network was established at IU under his direction, and the Pervasive Technology Laboratories were established with a $29.9 million grant from the Lilly Endowment in 1999. McRobbie was principal investigator of a project sponsored by the US National Science Foundation to connect US and Asian national research and education networks called TransPAC. The state-funded $5.3 million I-Light project connected all campuses of the IU system with fiber optic communications. In 2003 he became the vice president for research of IU. In 2005, the TransPAC2 project was funded as a follow-on to TransPAC. He was chairman of the steering committee for the Indiana Metabolomics and Cytomics Initiative, which was the largest outside funded project in the history of Indiana University Bloomington. McRobbie served as interim provost and vice president of academic affairs of the Bloomington campus in 2006. He increased external funding by securing millions of dollars in grants for life science initiatives. On a July 2006 trip through China he established a cooperative research program with Tsinghua University in Beijing. By September 2006, the then president of Indiana University, Adam Herbert, announced he wanted to leave office before July 2008. On March 1, 2007 McRobbie was selected as IU's 18th president and took office on July 1, 2007. He served on the board of directors for ChaCha. Some press were critical of a deal that used IU library staff as "guides", although McRobbie resigned from the board before becoming president of the University. McRobbie has served on the board of trustees for Internet2 since 2009, and was named chair of the board starting in 2012. In 2012 he announced a new supercomputer called Big Red II at IU. Although other universities operate larger computers, by some measures this Cray XK7 was expected to be the largest for use by a single US university and not a consortium or national resource. The original Big Red computer was installed in 2006.
Personal life
While still an undergraduate at the University of Queensland, McRobbie married Brisbane native Andrea Gibson in 1973. They had three children together. She died from brain cancer in 2003. A fellowship was named in her memory. McRobbie has three children and three stepchildren. His second wife, Laurie Burns McRobbie, was born in Michigan and worked as a technologist for 20 years. Both of them had been widowed before they married in 2005. Laurie McRobbie was the executive director of member and partner relations for Internet2, and an adjunct faculty member in IU's School of Informatics. After living in Indiana for 13 years, McRobbie became a US citizen in October 2010 while still retaining his original Australian citizenship.
