Jeffrey Scott Anderson is a double agent in the worlds of fiction and science. Committed to writing science thrillers without sacrificing plausibility in the slightest scientific details, he writes from a vantage point of a broad background in science and medicine.

His diverse interests surfaced as an undergraduate student in mathematics, where he also pursued concentrations in chemistry, physics, Russian literature, and psychology. He began his graduate studies in abstract mathematics, where he proved theorems about strategy spaces of infinite games. After completing his M.S. degree in mathematics, he followed his love of complex systems to forge a career studying the human brain.

At Northwestern University, he received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees, studying the brain circuitry underlying visual perception. From years of tracking electrical signals around brain cells, he advanced several new theories about how the brain successfully performs the complex computations required for sensory processing. His discovery that the brain uses random noise to improve sensitivity and flexibility in detecting visual cues solved a longstanding problem in vision research. His research has been published in numerous elite scientific journals, including Science, Nature Neuroscience, and Neuron. A professional CV can be found here.

Following his medical training, he became a resident physician at the University of Utah Medical Center. As an internal medicine intern, he became acquainted with first response procedures to biological weapons while serving in a busy emergency room during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. During this year, he began construction of Sleeper Cell, his first novel.

He subsequently began training in Diagnostic Radiology at the University of Utah, where he currently balances clinical responsibilities with his research in functional brain MRI and new diagnostic tests for multiple sclerosis. Most recently, he has received the Research Resident Award from the Radiological Society of North America.

He is scheduled to begin fellowship training in Neuroradiology in 2006, after which he may actually get a real job. Skeptics think it is more likely he will avoid employment to pursue his research, writing, and numerous hobbies, which include running, software development, digital video editing, and beach loitering.

After living around the United States, as well as in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Russia, he now resides in Salt Lake City with his wife and four energetic children. Whenever the children are asleep, he can be found constructing his next novel.