URBANA — The newly appointed leader of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has had extensive personal and professional experiences that include growing up in a segregated city, recording a song with Stevie Wonder and working with Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu.

Robert Jones, 65, was approved as the university’s next chancellor July 21, the (Champaign) News-Gazette reported.

Jones, who will be the university’s first black chancellor, grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Dawson, Georgia, and said education changed his life. He said he and his siblings began picking cotton and peanuts at the farm at a young age and that he is fortunate his parents highly valued education.

“We knew the potential was there, given the opportunity, for him to do whatever he put his mind to do,” said Mary Alice Browner, his sister. “He’s always been a go-getter.”

Jones went to Fort Valley State University and later earned a master’s in crop physiology from the University of Georgia.

He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri.

Jones said he wasn’t interested in administrative work until he got a call in 1986 from the president’s office, asking him to sit on a strategic planning committee.

Jones is scheduled to begin his duties Oct. 3.