Herbert Lawrence Anderson (May 24, 1914 – July 16, 1988) was an American nuclear physicist who was Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago.

He was also a member of the team which made the first demonstration of nuclear fission in the United States, in the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia University.

At the suggestion of Professor Dana Mitchell, Dunning offered Anderson a teaching assistant position if he would also help design and build the cyclotron.

Others assisting Anderson in the construction of the cyclotron were Eugene T. Booth, G. Norris Glasoe, Hugh Glassford, and professor Dunning.

[3][4][5] In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons;[6] simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner.

[9][10][11] Even before it was published, Meitner's and Frisch's interpretation of the work of Hahn and Strassmann crossed the Atlantic Ocean with Niels Bohr, who was to lecture at Princeton University.

On January 25, 1939, Anderson was a member of the experimental team at Columbia University that conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States,[13] which was conducted in the basement of Pupin Hall; the other members of the team were Eugene T. Booth, John R. Dunning, Enrico Fermi, G. Norris Glasoe, and Francis G.

A paper based on Anderson's PhD thesis, Resonance Capture of Neutrons by Uranium,[15] for security reasons, was not published until 10 years later.

Anderson worked under Fermi in the design and construction of Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), which achieved the first manmade nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942.

He was also a key consultant to DuPont in the design and construction of the Hanford reactors, which generated fissionable plutonium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

[3] Anderson's death was caused by lung failure, a derivative result of berylliosis — chronic beryllium poisoning, which he contracted during his work on the uranium project during the early days of World War II.