Associate Professor, Virginia Tech
Roanoke, VA
Primary Sector: Academia
Primary Discipline: Natural Sciences
Focus/Research Areas: Biological mechanisms; Data and statistics; Education; Health and
Medicine; Research and standards
Anne M. Brown, Ph.D., is a nationally recognized researcher, educator, and translational scientist whose work spans computational biochemistry, applied data science, and workforce development. She is an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech in University Libraries and the Department of Biochemistry. She earned her undergraduate degrees in Biochemistry and Physics from Roanoke College and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Virginia Tech. She has authored over 70 peer-reviewed publications in journals such as Cell, Structure, ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, and Nature Communications, and currently leads six federally funded projects totaling over $6.2 million, including an NSF CAREER award. Her work focuses on computer-aided drug design, amyloid aggregation mechanisms, molecular mechanisms of enzyme function, and digital diagnostics in substance use disorders. She developed open-access, reproducible pipelines for molecular modeling that are widely used in her lab, across collaborations, and in training materials for emerging scientists. She also maintains the Brown Lab YouTube channel with 2.5K+ subscribers, where her group shares tutorials that break down complex scientific tools and modeling concepts. She has mentored over 170 undergraduate students, many of whom have presented at national conferences, co-authored publications, or pursued graduate and professional programs. Her investment in experiential learning spans institutions, with multiple research-integrated courses and programs that bridge computational modeling, data science, and translational research. This commitment culminated in the 2025 launch of the Virginia Tech Discovery Lab, an interdisciplinary innovation space enabling students to prototype, visualize, and analyze real-world problems. She is a Council on Undergraduate Research Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor.