Professor
David J. Anderson
California Institute of Technology
Cell biologist; Educator
Area
Biological Sciences
Specialty
Neurosciences
Elected
2002
Dr. David J. Anderson is the Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology where he is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He also serves as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, where he was named a Distinguished Investigator in 2010. For the first 20+ years of his career, Anderson’s research focused on the biology of neural crest stem cells. He was the first to isolate a multipotent self-renewing stem cell for neurons and glia, and subsequently identified growth factors and master transcriptional regulators that control their differentiation into neurons vs. glia, as well as their self-renewal. Anderson has also made important contributions to angiogenesis and nerve-blood vessel interactions, including the discovery that arteries and veins are genetically distinct from before the onset of heartbeat. Beginning in the early part of the last decade, Anderson gradually switched his research focus from neural development to the study of neural circuits underlying innate behaviors that are associated with emotional states, including defensive behaviors and inter-male aggression. His work employs both mice and the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster as model organisms, and incorporates optogenetics, pharmacogenetics, electrophysiology, in vivo imaging, and quantitative behavior analysis using machine vision-based approaches. Dr. Anderson has been recognized with the Alden Spencer Award in Neurobiology, the Alexander von Humboldt Award, and the Ferguson Award for Graduate Teaching. He is an elected associate of the Neurosciences Institute, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, in addition to his American Academy of Arts and Sciences membership. His publications appear in journals such as Cell, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
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