He has published over 225 primary research articles and is the co-author with Caltech colleague Ralph Adolphs of The Neuroscience of Emotion: a New Synthesis (2018, Princeton University Press). Dr. Anderson has trained over 50 PhD students or postdoctoral fellows. He received the W. Alden Spencer Award in Neurobiology from Columbia University in 1999, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002), the US National Academy of Sciences (2007), and is a recipient of the 2017 Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize and the 2018 Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience from MIT. Dr. Anderson played a key role as an adviser to the late Paul Allen in the founding of the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences and the creation of the Allen Brain Atlas, and continues to serve as an adviser to that Institute. He has also served on two working groups for the NIH's BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovation in Neurotechnology) Initiative.
Dr. Anderson has engaged in the public communication of science through several channels. He published an OpEd in the New York Times, The Alchemy of Stem Cell Research (July 15, 2001), has delivered a TEDx talk ("Your Brain is More than a Bag of Chemicals," 2013) which has received almost 1.5 million views, has appeared on NPRs TED Radio Hour to discuss the talk, the National Edition of NPRs All Things Considered with Jon Hamilton (2019), and two episodes of Charlie Rose's Brain Series hosted by Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel. His work on aggression in fruit flies has been profiled in the NY Times ("To study aggression, a fight club for flies," Feb. 3rd 2014).