Sherman Robinson is a Research Fellow Emeritus in the Director General’s Office and Professor of Economics (retired), University of Sussex. He served as the Director of  IFPRI’s Trade and Macroeconomics Division from 1993 to 2004, and as an and Institute Fellow. He later rejoined IFPRI as a Senior Research Fellow in 2011.

Professor Robinson is a leading expert on global and national economic simulation models, particularly computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, which have become a standard tool of analysis to assess the economic impact of climate change, trade and fiscal policy, regional integration, structural adjustment, and development strategies. His research interests include the use of global economic models for scenario analysis on issues of climate change, international trade, economic growth, agricultural and resource issues, climate change adaptation, macroeconomic policy, income distribution, and maximum-entropy econometrics applied to estimation problems in developing countries.

Before joining IFPRI in 1993, he was Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley; Economist, Senior Economist and Division Chief in the Research Department of the World Bank; Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University; and Lecturer in Economics at the London School of Economics. He joined the Economics Department at the University of Sussex in 2004 and accepted a joint appointment with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex one year later. He has been a consultant to the World Bank and has held visiting senior-staff appointments at the Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture; the U.S. Congressional Budget Office; and the President's Council of Economic Advisers (in the Clinton administration), where he largely worked on trade issues, including regional trade agreements, GATT/WTO negotiations, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).