Noah Robinson is the son of the previous senator of District 2, Art
Robinson. He was raised in Cave Junction and homeschooled along with his 5
brothers and sisters. Noah and his family are experts in education. At the age
of 15, Noah oversaw the project to put together and market the second, and most
comprehensive, version of their self-teaching home school curriculum. The
Robinson Curriculum has educated more than 100,000 students worldwide. The
methods used are directly applicable to public school students.
An outstanding home-school student himself, Noah finished college
calculus at the age of 15 and went on to study college-level physics and
chemistry before applying to college. He took numerous advanced placement exams
and tested out of so many courses that he entered the chemistry program at
Southern Oregon University as a junior. He graduated in two years with a
bachelor’s degree in chemistry.
After earning his PhD in chemistry from Caltech, Noah worked with Nobel
Laureate Dr. Bruce Merrifield at Rockefeller University in New York City and
his father Dr. Art Robinson at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
They synthesized more than 900 peptides in an effort to understand a
specialized reaction in protein chemistry called “deamidation,” which is a
timing mechanism in biochemistry.
The work he accomplished allowed for a complete determination of the
peptide deamidation rates. Noah followed on this work with his favorite
theoretical paper based on these measurements. Using models of atoms and their
experimentally determined rates, Noah was able to figure out mechanistically
why the rates followed certain patterns in a truly elegant quantitative
approach. Noah and Art then used this work as a foundation to develop models
for predicting deamidation rates of amides in proteins.
But his work in science is not limited to specialized subjects. He has
worked on science that directly affects people’s lives and is critical to
current political discussions.
In 2007, Noah was a co-author with Dr. Art Robinson and Dr. Willie Soon
on a review article entitled “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric
Carbon Dioxide.” This review article showed definitively that burning
hydrocarbons like the gasoline in your car was having no measurable effect on
the earth’s temperature.
He
has also published papers on advanced medical diagnostics.
