Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials

Highlighted Associate Editor: Amanda Brown

Amanda is driven by the desire to make a difference in the world for the better, and her research has mainly been focused on the development of new diagnostics and drug discovery. She gained her PhD from the University of Nottingham (2002) in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and her thesis work described the identification of a point mutation responsible for herbicide resistance in a grass week. She post-doc’ed at UCL (2001-2003) and Queen Mary, University of London, and it was during this second post-doc that she started working on the causative agent of human tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) identifying new drug targets based and ended staying for 9 years. After a year in Sydney, Australia (2011-2012), Amanda joined Oxford Gene Technology where she led a team developing an NGS protocol to allow for the direct sequencing of pathogens from clinical specimens, including Mtb from sputum. In 2014 Amanda took a position at Cornell University, where she led a team screening over 1.2 million compounds for activity against Mtb in a macrophage model, and also developed a new cell-based screening assay – the deconstructed granuloma. Amanda joined Texas A&M in Feb 2020 as an assistant research professor, where her lab was focused on the development of new molecular based diagnostic assays, to be introduced to the Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnosis Laboratory (TVMDL). Since July 2021 Amanda has been working at Invitae in San Francisco, where she leads the lab-based efforts of the ID team, under the Metagenomics Arc.