Dr. Robin Bade was an undergraduate at the University of Queensland, Australia, where she earned degrees in economics and mathematics. After a spell teaching high school physics and math, she enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the Australian National University, from which she graduated in 1970.

Dr. Bade has held faculty appointments at the Bond University in Australia, University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and at the Universities of Manitoba, Toronto, and Western Ontario in Canada. Her research on international capital flows appears in the International Economic Review and the Economic Record. Dr. Bade first taught the principles of economics course in 1970 and has taught it (alongside international trade and finance and intermediate macroeconomics) most years since then. Robin developed many of the ideas found in her textbooks while conducting tutorials with her economics students at the University of Western Ontario (Canada).