Anne M. Brown named Data Science Faculty Fellow

20 Oct 2023

A woman wearing a sweater stands in front of the windows of a laboratory. — Anne M. Brown. Photo by Chase Parker for Virginia Tech.

Anne M. Brown, associate professor in University Libraries, affiliate professor of practice in the Department of Biochemistry, and affiliate faculty in the Academy of Integrated Science in the College of Science, has been awarded the Data Science Faculty Fellowship by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.

Data Science Faculty Fellowships were established in 2021 by an anonymous couple to enhance the national and international prominence of the study and teaching of data science at Virginia Tech. The fellowships recognize faculty dedicated to extraordinary research and teaching, to recruit scholars with exceptional records of achievement, and to retain high-performing faculty members with scholarly focus on data science or the application of data science within and across disciplines.

Recipients hold the title of Data Science Faculty Fellow for a period of three years.

A member of the Virginia Tech faculty since 2016, Brown has continued to focus her research and teaching in the applied data science domain with an emphasis on biomedical and life sciences.

Brown is an associate director within University Libraries Data Services and leads two internationally recognized research programs, Brown Lab and DataBridge. She designs and teaches computational and data-centric life science courses for biochemistry, computational modeling and data analytics (CMDA), and systems biology.

She is committed to mentoring student research, advising five Ph.D., six master’s students, and over 110 undergraduate students in her time at Virginia Tech. In 2019, she was recognized by the Virginia Tech Office of Undergraduate Research with the Outstanding Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentor Award and in 2020 received the Council of Undergraduate Research Outstanding Research Mentor Award. The CMDA program is part of the College of Science’s Academy of Data Science.

Brown’s scholarship includes approximately 50 publications in leading research journals. She has published five book chapters and is working on her first edited collection on inclusive excellence in STEM. She has presented at more than 30 conferences or seminars and was recently the keynote speaker at the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium annual conference. At the fall 2023 American Chemical Society Meeting, “Harnessing the Power of Data,” she received the American Chemical Society COMP Division OpenEye Cadence Molecular Sciences Outstanding Junior Faculty Award.

Brown's research has been recognized with funding from the highest levels. In 2022, she received a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award and has retained more than $2.1 million in research funding from both university and external sources including the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, the Virginia Catalyst program, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Brown received her bachelor’s degree from Roanoke College and a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech.

Anne Brown, Elizabeth Grant receives 2019 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award

Virginia Tech researchers discover insights into HIV with implications for drug development