David Jeffrey Anderson (born 1956) is an American neurobiologist. He is a

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland with additional facilities in Ashburn, Virginia. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American busin ...

investigator. His lab is located at the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

, where he currently holds the position of Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology, TianQiao and Chrissy Chen Leadership Chair and Director, TianQiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience. Anderson is a founding adviser of the Allen Institute for Brain Research, a non-profit research institute funded by the late Paul G. Allen, and spearheaded the Institute's early effort to generate a comprehensive map of gene expression in the mouse brain. He is the author of ''The Neuroscience of Emotion: A New Synthesis'' with Caltech neuroscientist Ralph Adolfs.

Education

Anderson earned a

Bachelor of Arts A Bachelor of Arts (abbreviated B.A., BA, A.B. or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is the holder of a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the liberal arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts deg ...

, ''

summa cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sout ...

'', in biochemical sciences from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

in 1978 with membership in

Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States. It was founded in 1776 at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal arts and sciences, ...

. He then received a Ph.D. in 1983 in cell biology from

Rockefeller University The Rockefeller University is a Private university, private Medical research, biomedical Research university, research and graduate-only university in New York City, New York. It focuses primarily on the biological and medical sciences and pro ...

, where trained under Nobel laureate

Günter Blobel Günter Blobel (; May 21, 1936 – February 18, 2018) was a Silesian German and American biologist and 1999 Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in ...

. He was a postdoctoral fellow at

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

in 1986 and researched under Nobel laureate

Richard Axel Richard Axel (born July 2, 1946) is an American molecular biologist and university professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His work on the olfactory system won h ...

Research

Anderson's work (mid 1980s–early 2000s) focused on the development and function of the nervous system, particularly the mechanism of fate determination of

neural stem cells Neural stem cells (NSCs) are self-renewing, multipotent cells that firstly generate the radial glial progenitor cells that generate the neurons and glia of the nervous system of all animals during embryonic development. Some neural progenitor ste ...

. His laboratory's current focus is to dissect genes and neural circuits underlying innate behaviors and associated emotion states, such as fear and aggression. At Caltech, Anderson has overseen projects such as studying aggression in fruit flies. He has also studied the mechanisms of fear and touch, and the neural activity in the brains of mice during social behaviors such as mating and aggression.

Awards and honors

Anderson received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1986, the 1999 Alden Spencer Award from Columbia University, and a Paul G. Allen Distinguished Investigator Award in 2010. In 2017, he won the 17th Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize and in 2018, he won the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience. He was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

in 2002. In 2007, he was elected a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

Select Publications

* *

References

External links

Anderson's profile on HHMI website

Anderson's profile at Caltech

The David Anderson Research Group website
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Anderson, David J. 1956 births American neuroscientists California Institute of Technology faculty Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Howard Hughes Medical Investigators Living people Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Place of birth missing (living people) Rockefeller University alumni Harvard College alumni Helen Hay Whitney Foundation fellows