In the first part of the talk I introduce the phenomenon of Anderson localization and discuss recent theoretical approaches to describe the metal insulator transition. In the second part I describe the role of Anderson localization in the chiral phase transition that occurs in QCD at finite temperature. Motivated by recent experiments in cold atoms I investigate the interplay of disorder and interactions in 1d Fermi gases and the conditions under which Anderson localization is suppressed in 1d disordered systems.