Robert P. Roesener
Associate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel
Rutgers Office of the Vice President and General Counsel
Email: rroesener@ogc.rutgers.edu
Robert focuses on the University’s transactional legal needs in the areas of real estate, capital finance, investments, construction, utilities, environmental compliance, commercial contracts, and procurement contracts. Robert also advises senior leadership on governance issues as well as the Rutgers Board of Governor’s Committee on Finance and Facilities and the Joint Committee on Investments. Robert also manages litigation and disputes that arise from the foregoing transactional practice areas, such as construction litigation and bid protests. Robert received a B.S. with high honors from Cook College and a J.D. from Rutgers School of Law – Newark where he graduated with high honors.
Project Sponsor
Laura Lawson
Dean, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences
Abstract:
Rutgers has world-renowned and cutting-edge faculty members discovering and further highlighting how individual and organizational decisions and actions positively or negatively impact human health and wellness, and the environmental sustainability of our community. However, it seems to me that there is sometimes a gap between knowing what is good for our health, wellness, and the environment, and an express University action plan to implement those ideas in our own organizational culture. Within this broad theme of improving the disconnect between research-based knowledge and implementation and, in turn, raising up Rutgers as an example or model institution that walks our talk, I seek to implement one example of putting knowledge into action within our organizational culture, and, in so doing, create a process, framework, or model that could be used to implement other examples of walking our talk, thus improving health, wellbeing, and environmental sustainability more broadly.
The example I seek to put into action relates to research on human microbiota from Professor Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello and Professor Liping Zhao from the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. Their research suggests that improving the variety of microbiota in our bodies will result in better health and wellness on an individual level. My project involves designing a way to improve our microbiota (whether through information or food or beverage products that employees could consume), encouraging the Rutgers community to use the information or products, and then, in turn, measuring health outcomes of the individuals in our community who participate, through testimonials and other object measures. Finally, any successes would be reported through public channels to incentivize and inspire other examples to move forward.