Eric W. Brown has been with the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) since 1999 and currently serves as Director of the Division of Microbiology in the Office of Regulatory Science. Here, he oversees a group of 60 food safety microbiology researchers and support scientists engaged in a multi-parameter research program to develop and apply microbiological and molecular genetic strategies for detecting, identifying, and differentiating bacterial foodborne pathogens such asSalmonella and shiga-toxin producing E. coli.
Recently, his laboratory has been designated as a Center of Excellence for Whole Genome Sequencing within the FDA Foods Program and has been instrumental in adapting next-generation sequencing technologies to augment foodborne outbreak investigations and to ensure preventive control and compliance standards at the FDA.
Dr. Brown received his M.S. in Microbiology from the National Cancer Institute/Hood College joint program in the biomedical sciences in 1993 and his Ph.D. in Microbial Genetics from The Department of Biological Sciences at The George Washington University in 1997.
He has conducted research in microbial evolution and genetics as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and as an Assistant Professor of Microbiology at Loyola University of Chicago. He has been a member of the American Society for Microbiology since 1994 and has co-authored more than 80 refereed publications and book chapters on the molecular differentiation and evolutionary genetics of bacterial pathogens.