Effective January 1, 2022, Dr. Robert (Bob) Oldendick retired from a decades-long career in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Carolina. Bob came to UofSC in 1989 from the University of Cincinnati to establish the Survey Research Lab (SRL), for which he served as Director until 2014. At the SRL, he launched the South Carolina State Survey and conducted more than 100 studies for various organizations in the state, including the Department of Health and Environmental Control, the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism, the Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services, the South Carolina Association of Counties, and the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce. In addition to serving as Director of the SRL, in 2001 he was named Director of the Institute for Public Service and Policy Research, a position that he held through 2016.

Bob received a joint appointment as an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science in 1993 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2001. He taught courses in Public Opinion and Politics; Elections and Voting Behavior; Survey Research; American National Government; Public Data Analysis; and the Political Science Discipline. He served as the department’s Director of Graduate Studies from 2019 until his retirement. He is the author or co-author of more than 40 refereed journal articles that have appeared in outlets such as Public Opinion Quarterly, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics. The 5^th edition of his text (co-authored with Barbara Bardes), Public Opinion: Measuring the American Mind, was published in 2016.

While at UofSC, Bob served as President of the Southern Association for Public Opinion Research and as Associate Editor of Public Opinion Quarterly. In 2015, he received the John M. Kennedy Achievement Award from the American Association of Survey Research Organizations.