ProfessorWarwick Anderson

B.Med.Sc., M.B., B.S., M.D. (Melbourne), M.A., Ph.D. (Pennsylvania); FAHA, FASSA, FAHMS, FRSN

Warwick Anderson is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Discipline of Health and leader of the Politics, Governance and Ethics Theme with the Charles Perkins Centre. From 2012-17 Warwick Anderson was ARC Laureate Fellow in the Department of History and the Center for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine. Additionally, he has an affiliation with History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney and is a Professorial Fellow of the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. In 2018-19 he was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, based in the Department of the History of Science.

As an historian of science, medicine and public health, focusing on Australasia, the Pacific, Southeast Asia and the United States, Professor Anderson is especially interested in ideas about race, human difference, and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also studied the history of immunology (particularly autoimmunity) and perceptions of 'waste'. Occasionally he writes programmatically on postcolonial science studies and, more generally, on science and globalisation. In recent years, his research has focussed on the conceptual development of disease ecology and planetary health, i.e., the population health impacts of climate change.

Before moving to Sydney in 2007, Prof. Anderson was Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health, Professor of the History of Science, and Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At Wisconsin he also served on the steering committee of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and was a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Previously Prof. Anderson taught at Harvard, Melbourne (where he founded the Centre for Health and Society, now the Centre for Health Equity), UCSF and Berkeley. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Australian Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (US), and the Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations. He was the Frederick Burkhardt Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2005-6), and a Guggenheim Fellow (2007-8). He has held visiting professorships at Harvard, Manchester and McMaster universities. In 2013 he was John Hope Franklin Fellow at Duke University and the Whitney J. Oakes Fellow in the Humanities Center at Princeton University. His books have been awarded the W.K. Hancock Prize (AHA, 2004); the Philippines National Book Award for Social Science (2008); the NSW Premier's General History Prize (2009 and 2014); the William H. Welch Medal (AAHM, 2010); and the Ludwik Fleck Prize (4S, 2010).

Prof. Anderson is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (FAHA), the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA), the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences (FAHMS), and the Royal Society of NSW (FRSN). In 2023, he was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science for distinguished contributions to science and technology studies, the Society's lifetime achievement award. In 2025, he was awarded the Arthur J. Viseltear Prize for lifetime achievement in public health history by the American Public Health Association. The Australian's research review named him Australia's 'top historian' for 2026.