Robin Holbrook selected as Marsh O’Neill Award recipient

BY BARBARA PALMER

There's a key to the smooth administrative operation of the Baxter Laboratory for Genetic Pharmacology, an endowed lab that works on the leading edge of gene therapy and stem cells and brings together researchers from multiple departments and continents, said Professor Helen Blau, lab director.

Her name is Robin Holbrook.

Holbrook, recipient of a 2003 Marsh O'Neill Award and the lab's administrative services manager, handles every new challenge as if it were easy, Blau said. At Baxter Lab, Holbrook directs a six-person administrative staff, serves as faculty affairs adviser and handles personnel issues -- including paychecks and visas -- for the lab's 50 students, faculty and staff. She is responsible for budgets and for scheduling courses and seminars. Holbrook also oversees grant reporting and submissions -- often creating the first drafts of research reports and abstracts herself.

"Holbrook's independence, reliability and good judgment allow senior faculty to concentrate on their research, knowing that lab operations are in good hands," Blau said. Holbrook is "self-motivated, thorough and thoughtful. You can have complete confidence in her. That's invaluable."

"One need only give Robin a vague idea of a task and she will take it from there. Everything will be done without the need for oversight," said K. C. Garcia, assistant professor of microbiology and immunology.

Throughout her career at Stanford, Holbrook has had a reputation as being someone who finds new ways to get work done. In the Baxter Lab, she started writing first drafts of reports as a way to give investigators a "little kick-start" in meeting reporting deadlines, she said. At the Stanford Magnetic Resonance Laboratory (SMRL), where Holbrook was lab manager, she taught herself desktop publishing in order to expedite the printing of conference proceedings. Holbrook mastered enough exact science to have served as assistant editor for conference proceedings and monographs, a role normally reserved for experts in the field, said Oleg Jardetzky, professor of molecular pharmacology and former SMRL director.

Holbrook earned a bachelor's degree in cultural anthropology from Stanford in 1974 but had second thoughts about her job prospects while working on a master's degree. She came back to campus to research employment opportunities at the career counseling center -- where she promptly was offered a job. Although she later worked for a few years off campus in human resources, Stanford, with its vibrant intellectual climate, is home, Holbrook said. (Her mother, Dorothy Holbrook, now retired, worked in the office of the dean of student affairs. Her sister, April Blaine, works in the Faculty/Staff Housing Office as a network administrator, and her son, Colin Holbrook, a high school senior, has worked during the summer and after school for Baxter Lab researchers.)

Holbrook's interest and education in cultural anthropology has been a boon in her work; about half of Baxter Lab's graduate students and many of the visiting scholars are from other countries, she said. It's helpful that she's aware of the impact that cultural differences have on behavior and expectations, she said. "It helps smooth the way."

At SMRL, Holbrook served as "a dedicated den mother to our many student postdoctoral fellows, collaborators and visitors -- many of them foreign and in need of additional help and protection from culture shock," Jardetzky said.

Her position, with its wide-ranging responsibilities, seems to be a vanishing model on campus, Holbrook said, but its variety and challenge are among the chief reasons she enjoys her job so much, she said. ("Robin hates only to be bored," Blau said.)

"I seem to thrive on being a jack of all trades," Holbrook said. "I love wearing different hats. That way you get to know everyone in the lab."