Ricky Robertson joined IFPRI in 2008. Prior to that he completed environmental and water related post-docs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Civil and Environmental Engineering as well as Agricultural and Consumer Economics departments. His PhD research (also at the University of Illinois) revolved around empirically modeling land use decisions using very large datasets to estimate discrete choice models. Prior to that, he earned a double major in Mathematics Education and Physics from Andrews University in Michigan.

His work is concerned with harnessing GIS and parallelized computation to help deal with research problems of a spatial nature and/or those which are prohibitively difficult to tackle using conventional computational resources. The interaction between the land surface, water, and human activity usually fall into these categories.