Amanda Brown

Amanda Brown serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Texas Tech University, where her research program investigates the formation and stability of microbial mutualisms across diverse hosts including humans, plants, insects, and nematodes. Her interdisciplinary approach integrates experimental and computational methodologies to address fundamental questions in host-microbe interactions.

Her academic journey includes a PhD in Molecular Ecology and Evolution from the University of British Columbia, followed by postdoctoral training in Population and Comparative Genomics at the University of Montana and Oregon State University, where she was awarded an AAUW Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr. Brown employs cutting-edge omics technologies including shotgun metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and miRNomics, combined with fluorescence in situ hybridization and advanced bioinformatics pipeline development. Her lab focuses on nutritional symbiosis, metabolic complementation, disease suppressive microbiomes, and microbial community resilience across systems such as plant-parasitic nematode endosymbioses, hemipteran insects, banana endophytes, mosquito viromes, cotton rhizospheres, and human chronic polymicrobial infections in cystic fibrosis. The overarching theme examines how mutualisms influence ecological processes like species invasions, biomass production, and disease outbreaks.

Analysis of her 15 most recent publications (2022-2025) reveals a dominant focus on nematode-bacterial symbioses—particularly Wolbachia and Cardinium in plant-parasitic nematodes—with significant contributions to understanding symbiont evolution, host range expansion, and horizontal gene transfer. Her work increasingly bridges agricultural systems (banana, cotton, sorghum) and clinical contexts (human infections), demonstrating how computational approaches can unravel complex microbiome dynamics across ecological scales.

Her scientific recognition includes:

• AAUW Postdoctoral Fellowship

As principal investigator of the Brown Lab, she directs research exploring microbial community dynamics through soil sampling, endosymbiont characterization, and metapangenomic analyses. Her team develops computational algorithms for big data handling in multi-omics networks, with applications in predicting microbiome resilience and developing disease-suppressive strategies for both agricultural and medical challenges.