Robert Sproull

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Robert Sproull is a retired American educator, physicist, and US Department of Defense official.

A graduate of Deep Springs College, Sproull studied English literature at Cornell University before taking a Ph.D. at the same university in physics. He began a promising and productive career as a physicist at Cornell and headed the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics (LASSP) and the Materials Science Center. Sproull left Cornell to become a founder of DARPA (then known as ARPA). As the agency's director (1963-4), he was a strong advocate of cooperation among academia, government, and industry to meet US scientific needs for defense and competition with the Soviet Union.

After taking up an administrative post at Cornell, he became provost and vice president of the University of Rochester in 1968. In 1975 he became the university's president. He retired as president and became professor of physics at the university in 1985.

In 2006, Sproull was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado.

Preceded by W. Allen Wallis

President of University of Rochester 1975 – 1984

Succeeded by Dennis O'Brien