Robert “Andy” Andersen is a native of Council Bluffs, Iowa. He is a member of the Iowa Law School Foundation and received both his BS and JD, with high distinction, from the University of Iowa and served as the articles editor for Volume 61 of the Iowa Law Review. 

A Littauer Fellow and MPA graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 1986, he taught graduate environmental and energy management courses as a professorial lecturer at George Washington University. 

Andersen spent the majority of his career with the federal government at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as deputy general counsel at the National Science Foundation (NSF), as the first general counsel of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, and as chief counsel of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. At NSF he served as senior United States representative in Antarctica and designed a cradle-to-grave waste management/pollution control program for United States bases on the continent.

His contributions to environmental protection span seven continents and were officially recognized by two U.S. presidents, his agencies, Congress, and the Federal Bar Association. He started his legal career in private practice working at Squire, Sanders & Dempsey in Cleveland, and later joined the DC firms of Dewey & LeBouef, Akerman Senterfitt, and Clark Hill, where he established Clark Hill’s Environmental and Natural Resources practice group.  

He currently serves as an environmental and renewable energy consultant. He and his daughter, Erica Andersen, an alumna of Iowa Law and partner at Covington in DC, recently established a STEM scholarship for entering Iowa law students.

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