David Anderson is professor of biology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif., where he has been a member of the faculty since 1986. His research focuses on the mechanisms whereby stem cells generate the diverse specialized cell types of the developing nervous system.

In 1992, his laboratory achieved the first isolation of a multipotent, self-renewing stem cell for neurons and glia from a vertebrate embryo. Subsequently, Anderson’s group identified extracellular signals that instruct the differentiation of such stem cells along various lineages, and transcription factors that act as master regulators of the neuronal and glial fates inside these cells. He is currently studying the factors that control the timing of the switch from generation of neurons to glia. Anderson has also made contributions to the study of blood vessel development, including the first discovery of gene expression differences between arteries and veins, and the finding that nerve fibers determine the pattern of arterial branching in the developing skin.

More recently, Anderson’s group has begun to shift its focus from neural development to the study of behavior. An initial goal has been to use molecular genetic techniques to map the neural circuits that mediate innate and learned fear. As a first step in this direction, Anderson’s lab has employed microarray technology to identify genes that serve as markers for particular sub-regions of the amygdala, a brain region implicated in fear and other emotional behaviors.

Anderson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.  He has held a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, a Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship in Neuroscience, and has been a Swirling lecturer at Harvard Medical School. He has received the Charles Judson Herrick Award from the American Association of Anatomy, the 1999 W. Alden Spencer Award in Neurobiology from Columbia University and was elected an Associate of the Neurosciences Institute in 2001. In 2002 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been vice chair of the Sloan Prize Selection Committee for the General Motors Cancer Research Award and a member of the Wiley Prize selection committee. Anderson is on the editorial board of numerous journals including Neuron, Development and Annual Review of Neuroscience and is a co-founder and member of the Scientific Advisory Board of StemCells, Inc.

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