Professor Anderson was born in Sydney, Australia. He took his undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering at Sydney University, and his doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He was President of the International Federation of Automatic Control for the triennium 1990 to 1993, and served as President of the Australian Academy of Science for four years from 1998 to 2002. He retired from the ANU as a Distinguished Professor and was appointed Emeritus Professor in July 2016. At that time he became Distinguished Professor at Hangzhou Dianzi University, until 2020.