Robert M. Schofield

Schofield and 15 students from University of Oregon and Lane Community College conducted studies in 2021 that led to the discovery of the heavy element materials zinc and manganese in "ant mandibles, spider fangs and scorpion sting tips" that harden and sharpen their cutting tools.

Schofield held postdoctoral positions in the university's Institute of Molecular Biology and at Lund University. He then joined the UO as a research faculty member, and was promoted in 2020 to Research Associate Professor.

In January 2016, Schofield and five undergraduate researchers published a paper in Royal Society Open Science, making video clips of ants' leaf processing behaviors. They "documented never-before-seen looks at the ants' prehensile skills — they're good at grabbing — and the layers of behaviors associated with gathering leaves, delivering them to the nests and processing them to grow the fungus that colony members eat".

Schofield served as a mentor for McNair Scholars at UO between 2015 and 2017, supervising student participation in biology and biochemistry projects.

Robert M. Schofield (born 1960) is an American physicist and a Research Associate Professor at the University of Oregon (UO). He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014.

Born in 1960, Schofield holds bachelor's degrees in experimental psychology (1982) and in physics (1983) from Brigham Young University. He earned a Ph.D. in 1990 at the University of Oregon, with the dissertation, X-ray microanalytic concentration measurements in unsectioned specimens: A technique and its application to zinc, manganese, and iron enriched mechanical structures of organisms from three phyla, advised by Harlan W. Lefevre.