Amanda M.V. Brown received her Ph.D. in molecular evolution from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She completed a postdoc in population genomics from the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of Montana in 2013 and a postdoc in comparative genomics and metagenomics in the Department of Integrative Biology at Oregon State University in 2016. She began her current position as Assistant Professor in microbial metagenomics in the Department of Biological Sciences at Texas Tech University in 2016.  
 
Her research examines how microbiomes facilitate or limit ecological, evolutionary, and physiological processes including disease. Her lab uses metagenomics (genomes of communities of organisms), bioinformatics, and multi-omics (including metatranscriptomics and miRNomics), along with fluorescence in situ hybridization with confocal microscopy and other methods to infer function and assess changes in communities and their genes over time. Her lab develops new methods and computational algorithms for microbiome analysis.  
 
Her focus is on (1) microbiomes of agricultural pests such as plant-parasitic nematodes and sap-feeding insects, (2) microbiomes and viromes of mosquitoes that vector diseases such as Zika/West Nile, (3) microbiomes associated with human disease, and (4) microbiomes within plants.  
 
She explores the "missing microbes" hypothesis of disease and how microbes drive change in host biology. She was previously awarded an AAUW Fellowship and was elected President of the Oregon State Postdoctoral Association. Currently, Dr. Brown mentors graduate and undergraduate researchers from Biology and Computer Science backgrounds in original microbiome research projects. Her undergraduate students come from the Honors College URS program, the CISER program, the Bridges to the Baccalaureate program, and the McNair Scholars program. She has developed and hosted symposia and served on scientific program committees of international conferences including ESA, SMBE, ISS, and Wolbachia. She has served as grant reviewer for CFI Canada, and currently serves on the editorial board of the journals Frontiers in Microbiology and Frontiers in Plant Science.