Dr. Robbins, along with several colleagues including Dr. Rachel Schneerson, received the prestigious Lasker Award in 1996 for the vaccine for preventing meningitis in children.

John B. Robbins was born in 1932 in Brooklyn, New York. He was born into a Jewish family (whose last name was originally Rabinowitz but was later changed) who had immigrated from Minsk, an eastern European city that is today the capital of Belarus. John’s parents founded a box and paper company and were upwardly mobile, emphasizing education for their children. Robbins received his bachelor’s degree in history in 1956 and a medical degree in 1959, both from New York University. Early in his career he was a pediatrician at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he trained in infectious disease and immunology. There he saw meningitis patients who inspired him to shift his career to research that would protect children from meningitis and other diseases. In the late 1960s he worked at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York.

Dr. Robbins was also the Sabin Gold Medal winner in 2001 for his pivotal role in the development of Hib conjugate vaccine, which is now used throughout the world. The use of this vaccine led to a dramatic decline in the number of infants and children suffering from meningitis and other systematic infections such as osteomyelitis and pneumonia. He received the World Health Organization Children’s Vaccine Initiative Pasteur Award (with Dr. Rachel Schneerson) in 2006, and Thailand’s Prince Mahidol Foundation Award for Public Health in 2017 (with Drs. Anderson and Schneerson).