Sherman Robinson is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), and Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Sussex. He is also a visiting professor at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Netherlands. He joined the Economics Department at Sussex in 2004 and then accepted a joint appointment with IDS in 2005. He worked at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) from 1993 to 2004 as Director of the Trade and Macroeconomics Division (1993 – 2003) and Institute Fellow (2003 – 2004), and he rejoined IFPRI as a Senior Research Fellow in 2011. Before joining IFPRI in 1993, he was: Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley (1983-1994); Economist, Senior Economist and Division Chief in the Research Department of the World Bank (1977-1983); Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University (1971-1977); and Lecturer in Economics at the London School of Economics (1969-1971). 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).

Professor Robinson is a leading expert on computable general equilibrium (CGE) simulation models, which have become a standard tool of analysis of trade and fiscal policy reform, regional integration, structural adjustment, and development strategies. His research interests include 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. He has published widely in international trade, growth strategies, regional integration, income distribution, empirical modeling methodologies, and agricultural economics.