John B. Anderson was born in New York State in 1945. He received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1967, 1969 and 1972. During 1972-1980 he was a faculty member at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept. at McMaster University, Hamilton,  Canada, and during 1981-1998 he was Professor in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering Dept. at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. Since 1998 he has held the Ericsson Chair in Digital Communication at Lund Univ., Sweden. He has held visiting professorships at the Univ. of Calif., Berkeley (1978-79), Chalmers Technical Univ., Sweden (1987),  Queen’s Univ., Canada (1987), Deutsche Luft- und Raumfahrt, Germany (1991-92, 1995-96) and the Tech. Univ. of Munich (1995-96). His research work is in coding and communication algorithms, bandwidth-efficient coding, and the application of these to data transmission and compression. He has served widely as a consultant in these fields.  He presently is Director of the Swedish Strategic Research Foundation Center for High Speed Wireless Communication at Lund.

Dr. Anderson was a member of the IEEE Information Theory Society Board of Governors during 1980-1987 and 2001-2006, serving as the Society’s Vice-President (1983-84) and President (1985). In 1983 and 2006 he was Co-Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory. He also served during the 1990s as chair of Research Initiation Grants for the IEEE Foundation.  He maintains an active interest in technical publishing, having served on the governing Publications Board of IEEE during 1989-91 and 1994-96. He served on the IEEE Press Board during various times in 1993-2006. During 1994-96 he was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Press, and since 1998 he has been editor of its book series on Digital and Mobile Communication. In other publications activities, he has served twice as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and as Guest Editor of the IEEE Communications Transactions on several occasions. 

Dr. Anderson is author or coauthor of six textbooks, including the landmark DIGITAL PHASE  MODULATION, Plenum (1986), and most recently,  DIGITAL TRANSMISSION ENGINEERING, IEEE Press/Wiley (1998, Second Ed. 2005), CODED MODULATION SYSTEMS, Plenum (2003), and UNDERSTANDING INFORMATION THEORY, IEEE Press (2005). He is Fellow of the IEEE (1987) and member of Fysiografiska Sällskapet i Lund (2006). He received the Humboldt Research Prize (Germany) in 1991. In 1996 he was elected  Swedish National Visiting Chair in Information Technology. He received the IEEE Third Millenium Medal in 2000.