Robert is currently working on a PhD at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, after spending about six years in industry working in commercial and government-sponsored operating system and network security research and development. His services are available as a private consultant and independent contractor working in operating system design and implementation, network protocol design and implementation, and systems security.

He is well known for being a member of the FreeBSD Core Team, security officer team, and release engineering team, and an active developer in the areas of security and file systems. Furthermore, he Robert was president of the board of the FreeBSD Foundation in 2003.

Robert founded the TrustedBSD Project in 1999 as well as the OpenBSM Project in 2005, which provide trusted operating system and audit extensions on the FreeBSD platform. Significant results of his work have now been integrated into the FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems, as well as many commercial products. While at Carnegie Mellon, he worked with the Coda Project, a weak consistency distributed file system aiming for improved support for mobility and fault tolerance.