Dr. Carolyn E. Anderson

Biography

Professor Anderson grew up in suburban Detroit and earned her B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Michigan. After an extended internship at Pharmacia and Upjohn Corporation in Kalamazoo, MI, she pursued her graduate degree in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of California – Irvine. After completing a teaching post-doctoral fellowship at Pomona College, Professor Anderson joined the faculty of Calvin University (formally 'College') in 2006, where she has risen through the ranks, becoming full professor in 2018. When she is not developing new methods for the synthesis of unique nitrogen heterocycles, Professor Anderson like to read and play games with her husband and their three kids.

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Even as a 10-year-old girl, Carolyn Anderson knew what she wanted to do with her life.

"When I was 10, my uncle got married to a woman, Heather, who was just starting her PhD in epidemiology,” said Anderson, a chemistry professor at Calvin College. “Heather sent me lots of pop-science, you know, ‘What is in the potato salad?’ Kind of epidemiological mysteries if you will … I thought that was the coolest stuff ever.”

Science Intensive

Anderson took a full six years worth of science in high school. “What I found was that I was fine at biology, and I was fine at physics, but I didn’t find them particularly interesting,” said Anderson. “The way I was taught biology was a lot of memorization, and that doesn’t really work for me. And physics I had some trouble with: The ball gets to the bottom of the hill—and I was never sure why we were still talking about the ball.”

Thus, Anderson entered the University of Michigan as a chemistry major and never looked back. She began researching in the organic chemistry lab there in her sophomore year.

Graduate Work

While attending U of M, Anderson joined a co-ed chemical sciences fraternity called Alpha Chi Sigma. In her senior year, Anderson took charge of the annual lectureship that the fraternity sponsors. Despite having a small budget, the fraternity managed to draw eminent speakers from the world of chemistry. Anderson invited 1995 Nobel laureate F. Sherwood (Sherry) Roland from the University of California-Irvine (UCI).

"By the time he left, he was convinced I should be doing graduate work at UCI,” said Anderson, “and so I ended up applying very, very early and only applied, in fact, to UCI, at his prompting.” Anderson calls her time at UCI, which is in Orange County, a great experience. It was there that she met her husband Chris. After Anderson finished up her PhD at UCI, she worked for two years at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.

Her road to Calvin University was a winding one.

"I was confident that I wanted to be in a primarily undergraduate institution,” Anderson said. “What I didn’t know when I interviewed at that point was what the details around the outside were going to look like.” Anderson didn’t know if she wanted to be at a large or small, public or private, or secular or Christian institution. “Those details were all sort of fuzzy, and so I interviewed very broadly,” she said. “I made a lot of trips and had a lot of phone interviews.”