Dr. Anderson is the Austen Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and serves as the Chief Academic Officer (CAO) at Mass General Brigham (MGB). He is also the Academic Dean at MGB for Harvard Medical School.

As CAO at MGB, Dr. Anderson manages a ~ $2.7B research enterprise. He oversees several key system-wide departments at MGB, including Human Research Affairs, Clinical Trials Office, Research Management, Research IS Computing, Personalized Medicine, Gene and Cell Therapy Institute and Graduate Medical Education.

He has earned an international reputation in the area of post-transcriptional control of gene expression during stress and inflammatory responses. He discovered that a prion-related, low complexity domain in the RNA-binding protein TIA1 promotes a liquid phase transition leading to the assembly of stress granule (SGs), a class of membraneless organelle that organizes cellular components and has been implicated in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disease. His related discovery that angiogenin (ANG)-induced tRNA fragments (tiRNAs) target the translation machinery to re-program gene expression and promote cell survival has been linked to motor neuron survival.