Roy Anderson (zoologist)

Professor Sir Roy Malcolm Anderson FRS is a leading British expert on epidemiology. He has mathematically modelled the spread of diseases such as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and AIDS.

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Roy Anderson was born in 1947. He gained a BSc in zoology at Imperial College and a PhD in parasitology in 1971.

The majority of Roy Anderson's early career was at Imperial College, becoming a full professor by 1984. He was also director of the Wellcome Research Centre in Parasitic Infections from 1989 to 1993. In 1993 he became head of the Zoology department and Linacre Chair of Zoology at the University of Oxford.

Roy Anderson was in charge of the UK Government's Foot and Mouth control policy in 2001, a policy that culminated in the allegedly needless destruction of around six million UK cattle.

Currently (2006) he is Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Ministry of Defence - a two year secondment. He is also Chair in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London.

Professor Anderson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 2004. He was knighted in the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours list.

Professor Anderson will succeed Sir Richard Sykes as the 14th Rector of Imperial College in the summer of 2008.