Rate My Professor Melissa Brown

Professor Melissa Brown is a Professor in Microbiology in the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University. She completed her B.Sc. in 1983, B.Sc. (Hons) in 1984, and Ph.D. in 1992 in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Adelaide. Her doctoral research focused on the molecular characterisation of regions in Vibrio cholerae. She undertook postdoctoral training with Professor Robert Hancock at the University of British Columbia in Canada, supported by a Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 1993 she returned to Australia to work with Professor Ronald Skurray at the University of Sydney before relocating her laboratory to Flinders University in 2007, where she holds her current position.

Professor Brown’s research specializations center on the molecular mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance in pathogenic bacteria, with a particular emphasis on multidrug efflux pumps that contribute to bacterial evasion of host defenses and antibiotics. Her work examines the structures, functions, and evolution of these efflux systems in organisms such as Acinetobacter baumannii and Staphylococcus aureus, alongside the development of molecular techniques to study pathogen success. She is a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology and a Fellow of the Australian Society for Microbiology. Professor Brown serves as Senior Editor of the Journal of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology and has held committee roles in professional societies including the South Australian Branch of the Australian Society for Microbiology and the Adelaide Protein Group. Her teaching focuses on microbiology and molecular techniques, and she coordinates and lectures in multiple undergraduate and research topics at Flinders University.