Professor Anna Whittaker completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2005, and then undertook post-doctoral research for one year with Prof Douglas Carroll. She then went on to win a prestigious 5-year Research Councils UK Fellowship. On completion of the fellowship in 2011 she was promoted to Senior Research Fellow, in 2012 to Reader in Behavioural Medicine, and to Professor in 2016.

She received the Herbert Weiner Early Career Award 2010 from the American Psychosomatic Society in recognition of importance and sophistication of research for this career stage. Professor Whittaker also won the Neal Miller Early Career Award from the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research 2010 - a very prestigious award to research. In 2011 she became the inaugural winner of the award for outstanding contributions to research from the British Psychological Society Division of Health Psychology. In 2014 she received the Stress and Anxiety Research Society’s Early Career Award for her research on stress and anxiety.

In 2016 she was recognised as a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and in 2019 she was recognised as a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.