Roy Anderson

Sir Roy Anderson

Sir Roy Anderson FRS, FMedSci was Rector of Imperial College London from 1 July 2008 to 31 December 2009, following a 40-year association with the College. He continues to be Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the Division of Epidemiology, Public Health and Primary Care.

Sir Roy attended Duncombe School and Hertford Grammar School in Hertfordshire. He gained a first in zoology in 1968 and a PhD in parasitology, both at Imperial College London. After completing his PhD in 1971 he became an IBM biomathematics research fellow at the University of Oxford, before moving to King's College London to become a lecturer in parasitology in 1973.

He returned to Imperial in 1977 as a lecturer and was made professor in 1982 and Head of the Department of Biology in 1984, a position he held until 1993 when he became Head of the Department of Zoology and Linacre Chair of Zoology at the University of Oxford.

In 2000 he returned to Imperial, bringing with him a research team of around 40 people, to set up and lead the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, focused on the epidemiology, population biology, evolution and control of infectious diseases such as AIDS and HIV, SARS, bird flu and pandemic influenza, BSE and vCJD and the epidemic viral infections of livestock including foot and mouth. Between 2004 and 2007 Sir Roy was on secondment from Imperial College to act as Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence.

Sir Roy has also served as Director of the Wellcome Centre for Parasite Infections from 1989 to 1993 (at Imperial) and as Director of the Wellcome Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Disease from 1993 to 2000 (at Oxford). He is the author of over 450 scientific articles and has sat on numerous government and international agency committees advising on public health and disease control including the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS. From 1991-2000 he was a Governor of the Wellcome Trust.

He currently chairs the science advisory board of WHOs Neglected Tropical Diseases programme, is a member of the Bill and Melinda Gates Grand Challenges advisory board, and chairs the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative advisory board (SCI) funded by the Gates Foundation. He is a non-executive director of GlaxoSmithKline.

Sir Roy was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986, a Founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998, a Foreign Associate Member of the Institute of Medicine at the US National Academy of Sciences in 1999 and he was knighted in the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours.