Rate My Professor Christopher Anderson

Christopher V. Anderson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of South Dakota, where he joined as Assistant Professor in 2016 and was promoted in 2023. He earned a Ph.D. in Biology with emphases in Physiology and Morphology from the University of South Florida in 2013, advised by Stephen M. Deban, and a B.S. in Animal Science from Cornell University in 2006, where he was a Presidential Research Scholar. Prior to USD, he held postdoctoral appointments at Brown University as Research and Teaching Associate in Vertebrate Morphology from 2013 to 2015 and Research Associate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from 2015 to 2016. Anderson chairs the IUCN Species Survival Commission Chameleon Specialist Group since 2019 and serves as Honorary Researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences from 2025 to 2028. His honors include the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Award in 2022 for $1,227,524 to study mechanisms and drivers of thermal specialization in elastic recoil and muscle-powered movements, a supplement grant of $60,340 in 2024, the University of South Dakota President's Award for Research Excellence - Early/Mid-career Faculty or Staff in 2022, and the College of Arts & Sciences Richard and Sharon Culter Award in the Science and Mathematics Division in 2025. Additional funding supports his work, such as IUCN grants for chameleon Red List assessments and Sigma Xi Grants-in-Aid of Research.

Anderson's research broadly investigates physiological and biomechanical systems in ecological and evolutionary contexts, specializing in functional morphology, biomechanics, herpetology, muscle physiology, and physiological ecology, with a focus on chameleon feeding kinematics, ballistic tongue projection, supercontractile hyoid muscles, thermal effects on performance, biotremor communication, and locomotor biomechanics. Notable publications include 'Convergently evolved linear actuators in ballistic tongues' (Zeng, Anderson, & Deban, Current Biology, 2025), 'Feats of supercontractile strength: Functional convergence of supercontracting muscle properties among hyoid musculature in chameleons' (Schneider, Henchal, Diaz, & Anderson, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2025), 'What factors influence rediscovery of lost tetrapod species?' (Lindken et al., Global Change Biology, 2024), 'Communication via biotremors in the veiled chameleon (Chamaeleo calyptratus)' Parts I and II (Denny, Huskey, Anderson, & Smith, Integrative and Comparative Biology, 2023), and 'Relationship between gene expression networks and muscle contractile physiology differences in Anolis lizards' (Smith et al., Journal of Comparative Physiology B, 2022). His scholarship, cited over 596 times per Google Scholar, impacts comparative biomechanics and chameleon conservation through leadership in international assessments and student-mentored discoveries on convergent evolution and muscle function.