John L. Anderson

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John L. Anderson (born 1945) is an American chemical engineer and university administrator who has led several top institutions. He served as the eighth president of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and later as president of the National Academy of Engineering.

Early life and education
He grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. He earned a B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware in 1967, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with his Ph.D. completed in 1971.

Academic career
Anderson began his faculty career at Cornell University as an assistant professor of chemical engineering for five years. He then joined Carnegie Mellon University on September 1, 1976, where he became director of the Biomedical Engineering Program, later attained the rank of university professor in 1994, and served as dean of the College of Engineering starting in 1996. He left CMU in 2004 to become provost, vice president, and professor of chemical engineering at Case Western Reserve University.

While at Case Western Reserve, he and the university’s president faced a no-confidence vote in 2006. In 2007, Anderson moved to the Illinois Institute of Technology as president and professor of chemical engineering. He stepped down as IIT president after eight years.

National Academy of Engineering and other honors
Anderson was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1992 for his work on colloidal hydrodynamics and membrane transport phenomena. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and has been a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the Acrivos Professional Progress Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 1989 and was a Guggenheim Fellow from 1982 to 1983. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Delaware, IIT, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Case Western Reserve University. He was appointed to the National Science Board in 2014 and was elected president of the National Academy of Engineering in 2019 for a six-year term.