Andrea Brand

Andrea Hilary Brand (born March 9, 1959)FRS FMedSci is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. She heads a lab investigating nervous system development at the Gurdon Institute and the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. She developed the GAL4/UAS system with Norbert Perrimon which has been described as “a fly geneticist's Swiss army knife”.

Early life and education

Brand was born in the U.S., where her father was an economist at the United Nations in New York. She graduated from the UN International School in New York and in 1977, inspired by the work of Rosalind Franklin, she moved to Britain to study biochemistry at the University of Oxford. She studied at Oxford from 1977 to 1981, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree with Honors. From there she went to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge. She was there from 1981 to 1986, in which year she was awarded a Ph.D.

Career

Postdoctoral work