Tom Anderson is a Professor of Computing Science, and Director of the Centre for Software Reliability. He is currently engaged in the Framework 6 Network of Excellence ReSIST for which he acts as co-chair of the Executive Board.

After early research on efficient methods of syntactic analysis (PhD awarded 1972), he moved into work on fault tolerance and software dependability – acting as principal investigator on a series of research projects including a major experimental evaluation of software fault tolerance techniques, and a long running 17 year project on dependable avionic systems. In June 2007 he served as General Chair for the International Dependability of Systems and Networks Conference (DSN 2007).

Previously, Tom spent a year in Virginia investigating fault tolerance for NASA flight software, and a summer in California working at UCLA on decision algorithms.

From 1992-97 he was Head of Department for Computing Science; from 1998-2002 he was the last Dean of the Faculty of Science.

The Centre for Software Reliability (CSR) was established at Newcastle by Tom Anderson in 1984; it is now closely aligned with the Dependability research group, and has acquired a national reputation for dissemination and maintaining awareness of dependability issues. To date, CSR has organized 170 events with over 13,000 delegates in total.