Dr. William Anderson

The McDermott Professorships were established in August 2017, funded by an anonymous gift, with the goal of providing early career support and recognition to faculty members who have established extraordinary records of research productivity, teaching excellence, and university service, and who show promise of being leaders of the UT Dallas faculty in the future.


“With this generous professorship, I will be afforded unique flexibility to pursue discretionary research efforts that broaden fundamental understanding on the physics of turbulent flows. This has implications for design of engineering devices and for characterization of mixing in geophysical flows. UT Dallas is a science and technology powerhouse, founded by a science and technology powerhouse: I could not imagine a better environment for scholarly research.”

Dr. William Anderson studies fluid dynamics, with an emphasis on turbulent flows in the environment and in engineering. He uses supercomputing resources at national scientific computing centers to model such flows. His research ranges from studying surface currents in the Gulf of Mexico to understanding how pollutants are transported along the ocean floor. He also developed models that explain how wind vortices on Mars sculpted distinct geographic features on the arid Martian landscape.

His most cited works use high-performance computer modeling to examine turbulent, boundary-layer flow over surfaces of variable roughness. Work on these topics has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Office and the Texas General Land Office.

Anderson has published more than 20 peer-reviewed articles in international journals, including the Journal of Computational PhysicsJournal of Fluid Mechanics and Physics Review Fluids. He’s affiliated with the American Physical Society, American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society.

In 2014, Anderson received the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research’s Young Investigator Award. He also received the Creel Family Teaching Award while at Johns Hopkins University in 2009.

Anderson earned his bachelor’s degree from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. He received an MS in civil engineering from Texas Tech and an MS in mechanical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, where he earned his doctorate.
He was a research assistant at Texas Tech and Johns Hopkins before joining the faculty at Baylor University in 2011. He arrived at UT Dallas in 2014.