Robert Philip Wagner (1918-2004) was an American professor of genetics who spent most of his academic career at the University of Texas at Austin.
He had planned to begin a Ph.D. with Theodosius Dobzhansky at the California Institute of Technology, but after Dobzhansky decided to relocate to Columbia University, Wagner decided he preferred not to stay in New York and instead took a position at the University of Texas at Austin to work with J. T. Patterson on the genetics of Drosophila (fruit flies).
[1] After the end of World War II, Wagner was offered a faculty position at the University of Texas with an allowance made for time off to complete a postdoctoral fellowship.
He spent a few years as a research fellow at Caltech, where he met Herschel K. Mitchell, with whom he coauthored his first book, Genetics and Metabolism.
Wagner returned to Austin in 1947 to join the UT faculty and established a research program based on the genetics of the model organism Neurospora, a type of fungus.