Patrick Robinson is a physician who enjoyed a long career in academic medicine, public health, and in anti-infective drug development in the pharmaceutical industry before moving to Davidson. He has had a long-standing interest in virology and epidemiology, especially HIV and other viral infections. He received his medical school training at Wayne State University in Detroit and his Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases training at University of Pittsburgh and University of Oklahoma. He was an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control, and Chief of the Infectious Diseases at West Virginia University, before joining Pfizer and later Boehringer Ingelheim to lead teams developing drugs for serious fungal, bacterial, and viral infections, including HIV.