Born in Oklahoma in 1942, Richard Allan Andersen was raised and educated in the small town of Yankton, South Dakota. He obtained his bachelors degree in 1965 from the University of South Dakota. Andersen pursued graduate studies at the University of Wyoming, working under the supervision of Professor Geoffrey Coates. Andersen was Coates last student. In 1973, Andersen earned his Ph.D. with several fundamental organometallic and alkoxide compounds of beryllium.
Andersen then spent a year as postdoctoral researcher at the Oslo Centre for Industrial Research. On the day it was announced that Geoffrey Wilkinson and Ernst O. Fisher would share the 1973 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Andersen received an offer to conduct his postdoctoral research in Wilkinsons laboratory at Imperial College London. Andersen took up this post a few months later, in 1974. In June 1976 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeleys department of chemistry. He remained a professor in the department until his death in 2019.
Andersen was also active in teaching throughout his career, and was well-known for teaching from the primary inorganic chemistry literature, as well as his hands-on approach to teaching undergraduate laboratory courses.