Laura Brown, Ph.D. received her B.S. in chemistry at Illinois Wesleyan University, where she received her first research experience in the lab of Professor Ram S. Mohan. Prof. Brown then headed to the east coast for graduate school at Boston College where she earned her Ph.D. in organic chemistry with Professor Amir H. Hoveyda in 2008. Her graduate research was focused on the field of enantioselective catalysis. During her time at BC, she developed an interest in the chemistry and biosynthesis of natural products which led her to the laboratory of Professor Jon Clardy at Harvard Medical School, where she was awarded a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship. She worked jointly with Dr. Michael Fischbach (now at Stanford) on several projects related to natural products discovery.
Throughout her graduate and post-doctoral studies, Prof. Brown maintained an interest in undergraduate education and had the good fortune of being provided with many meaningful teaching and mentoring opportunities. Since joining the teaching faculty at IU in 2011, she has taught a variety of large and small organic chemistry and spectroscopy lecture and laboratory courses and has focused on presenting the material in a way that is accessible to as many students as possible. She established a research collaboration with Professor Julia van Kessel in biology in 2015 and turned this work into a year-long research laboratory course within the Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Experiences program (ASURE) at IU.