Anderson, Thomas Foxen, 1911-1991

Thomas Foxen Anderson, a biophysicist and electron microscopist, was born on February 7, 1911 in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. After attending high schools in Wisconsin, Illinois, and California and graduating from Glendale Union High School in California in 1928, he entered the California Institute of Technology, where he received a B.S. in chemistry in 1932.

At this early stage of his scientific career, Anderson began to display a remarkable technological ingenuity and a penchant for using advanced technologies to resolve microscopic structures. During a post-graduate year abroad at the University of Munich, he employed an inexpensive spectrograph to study the dispersion of crystals, working under the guidance of physical chemists, Kasimir Fajans and Peter Wulff. After his return to Cal. Tech. in 1933, to pursue graduate studies with Don M. Yost and Linus Pauling, Anderson became an expert in Raman spectroscopic analysis of polyatomic molecules. Several publications resulted from this work before Anderson received his doctorate in chemistry in 1936.

...