Ross John Anderson (Biographical Memoir of Ross John Anderson for the Royal Society)

Ross Anderson was Professor of Security Engineering at the Department of Computer Science and Technology of the University of Cambridge and lately also at the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh. Originally trained as a mathematician at Cambridge, he initially branched out into fields as diverse as avionics, typesetting, cryptography and banking. He roamed across Europe, Asia and Africa before coming back to Cambridge for a PhD as a mature student and then joining the faculty. He helped establish several new research areas in security, catalysing the formation of academic communities around Information Hiding, Security APIs, Security Economics, Security and Human Behaviour and more. The thread that linked his diverse contributions was to view security as an engineering discipline, as summed up in his encyclopedic yet engaging book Security Engineering, now on the bookshelf of most researchers and practitioners in the field.