Robert Calvin Armstrong is the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative and the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering. He has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1973, and served as head of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 1996 to 2007. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2008 for conducting outstanding research on non-Newtonian fluid mechanics, co-authoring landmark textbooks, and providing leadership in chemical engineering education. In 2020, he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.