Amy Brand

Dr. Amy Brand is a publisher, entrepreneur and executive widely recognized for expanding access to knowledge and promoting equity in science. As Director and Publisher of the MIT Press, one of the largest university presses in the world, she takes risks and leads change as she oversees the publication of challenging, groundbreaking, and meticulously designed books and journals in science, technology, art, and design. Under Dr. Brand’s leadership, the Press has published more books by and about women in STEM than any other university press, created a new open access business model for scholarly books, and launched a first-of-its-kind collaboration between a university press and a leading children’s publisher. She is upending the traditional monograph model with a new open collection initiative, Direct to Open, that provides global access to as much scholarly book content as possible.

In 2019, Dr. Brand cofounded the Knowledge Futures Group, a nonprofit dedicated to building and supporting products and protocols to make knowledge open and accessible to all. She was a founding member of the ORCID Board, an initiative to create a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and has played a key role in establishing a wide range of metadata standards supporting the scientific record.

Dr. Brand currently serves on boards of several information and media organizations, including the International Science Council, Creative Commons, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Coolidge Corner Theater Foundation, and the Board on Research Data and Information of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

She was executive producer of the documentary Picture a Scientist, a 2020 selection of the Tribeca Film Festival that highlights gender inequality in science. Some of Dr. Brand’s awards include the Laya Wiesner Community Award, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award, and the Award for Meritorious Achievement issued by the Council of Science Editors.

Dr. Brand received her doctorate in cognitive science from MIT and held a number of positions in scholarly communications, higher education, and information access at MIT, Digital Science, Crossref, and Harvard University, before returning to the MIT Press as Director in 2015.