Robert Samuel Houk was born in New Castle Pennsylvania and attended Shenango Area High School. He received the B. S. in Secondary Education from Slippery Rock State College in 1974 and the Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from Iowa State University in 1980. His dissertation described the first results from coupling an analytical ICP to a mass spectrometer. He was a postdoctoral associate at the Ames Laboratory USDOE and then joined the faculty in the Chemistry Dpeartment at ISU in 1981.

ABSTRACT
He is presently Professor of Chemistry and an Associate of the Ames Laboratory. His research is in analytical atomic spectrometry, especially ICP-MS, and also in laser ablation electrospray ionization mass spectrometry. Houk has served on various editorial boards, e.g., JAAS and Spectrochimica Acta Part B. He has won several awards including the ACS Awards for Chemical Instrumentation (1993) and Spectrochemical Analysis (2012).