Born in
Oklahoma in 1942, Richard Allan Andersen was raised and educated in the small town of
Yankton,
South Dakota.[6] He obtained his bachelor's degree in 1965 from the
University of South Dakota.[5] Andersen pursued graduate studies at the
University of Wyoming, working under the supervision of Professor
Geoffrey Coates.[4][6] Andersen was Coates' last student.[6] In 1973, Andersen earned his Ph.D. with several fundamental organometallic and alkoxide compounds of beryllium.[7][8][9][10][11][12]
Andersen then spent a year as postdoctoral researcher at the Oslo Centre for Industrial Research.[13] On the day it was announced that
Geoffrey Wilkinson and
Ernst O. Fisher would share the 1973
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Andersen received an offer to conduct his postdoctoral research in Wilkinson's laboratory at
Imperial College London.[5][6] Andersen took up this post a few months later, in 1974.[13] In June 1976 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley's department of chemistry.[4] He remained a professor in the department until his death in 2019.[4]
Andersen was also active in teaching throughout his career, and was well-known for teaching from the primary inorganic chemistry literature,[14] as well as his hands-on approach to teaching undergraduate laboratory courses.[4][5]
Research
Andersen began his independent research career at UC Berkeley in 1976. Initially his research focused on ligand substitution patterns in quadruply-bonded Mo2 complexes.[6] He also studied actinide coordination complexes bearing the
sterically bulky amido ligand –N(SiMe3)2, including the uranium(III) compound U[N(SiMe3)23,[6][15] which was later found to have pyramidal geometry.[16]