[1] He began working at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 1948 before moving to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1954 as an investigator.
At NIH, he was chief of the Clinical Endocrinology Branch (part of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases) from 1963 to 1991.
These observations guided the development of targeted doses for thyroxine replacement for patients with hypothyroidism.
[3] Robbins and Rall also performed important research on thyroid cancer caused by radiation; they followed survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to monitor long-term outcomes.
[3] His other research topics included the effectiveness of iodine-131 therapy in certain types of thyroid cancer, the use of triiodothyronine (T3) prior to iodine-131 therapy, the relationship between thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) and thyroglobulin, the use of lithium to increase iodine-131 uptake, and the safety of weekly dosing of thyroxine replacement compared with daily dosing.