Andrea Brand
Molecular Biologist
Andrea Hilary Brand (born March 9, 1959) 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 and research
Postdoctoral work
She then engaged in postdoctoral research work on yeast transcription at Harvard University, where from 1986 to 1988 she was a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry, associated with the laboratory of Mark Ptashne. Having decided to switch from biochemistry to neurobiology, Brand moved in the late 1980s to Norbert Perrimon's laboratory in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, where from 1988 to 1993 she was a Leukemia Society Special Fellow.
It was there that Brand conceived of the GAL4 system, which Lancet has described as "an ingenious toolkit that allows researchers to turn on genes in any cell type and at any time of development, and thus engineer and test the function of both genes and proteins.
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