Needa Brown

Education

• 2017 - 2021:Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hosital, Dana/Farber Cancer Institute, USA (Postdoctoral Fellow, Medical Physics)
• 2013 - 2017:University of Oklahoma, USA (Ph.D., Biomedicial Engineering)
• 2010 - 2013:Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S. Biomedical Engineering)

Bio

Needa Brown joined the UCF Department of Materials Science and Engineering in Fall 2024 as an assistant professor under the Infectious Disease and Travel Health Initiative. Her research is centered around understanding and leveraging inherent material-biological interactions to design next-generation nanomaterial solutions to tackle cancer and infectious diseases. She completed her doctoral degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 2017 and continued her training as a post-doctoral fellow in the Division of Medical Physics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she later was promoted to instructor of medicine. In September 2021, she moved to Northeastern University as an assistant teaching professor of physics, where she was the founder and director of the master’s in nanomedicine program, served as assistant director of the NCI-funded CaNCURE program and launched a successful bio-nano research program funded by multiple CDMRP and NIH awards.

Her research program at UCF aims to study nanomaterial-biological interactions in a systematic approach with the goal to create a pipeline for nanoengineered biomedical solutions that will expand therapeutic options to previously unattainable patient populations. Her lab focuses on three key areas: the design of nanomaterials to circumvent drug delivery barriers; leveraging inherent material-biological interactions for nanomaterial design; and designing tools to assess nanomaterial response in biologically relevant systems.