Edgar Anderson

Edgar Anderson (HF 1966-68) is a Scot (B.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc., Glasgow University) who was a Salters’ Fellow at the University of Strasbourg when he applied for a Harkness Fellowship. He worked at the Gates and Crellin Laboratories of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology, ‘CalTech’, Pasadena, Southern California on ‘The Conformational Dynamics of Simple Organic Molecules using NMR Spectroscopy’. He continued in this same broad field on his return to Britain as successively, a Ramsay Fellow, a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader and finally Professor of Organic Chemistry at University College London. He retired in 2005 having published over 120 papers in leading Chemical Journals, and has a Hirsch Index of 32. He was the Crabtree Orator in 2007 and President of the Crabtree Foundation in 2017-8. He met Eleanor Colwell, a Canadian on a short visit to Caltech, towards the end of his time there. They were married in 1970 and have lived in the same house in Rickmansworth since that time. They have two daughters and three grandchildren.