Joseph Brown

Joseph S. Brown is an Assistant Professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and Faculty Advisor to the Medicinal Chemistry Self-Driving Lab (MedChem SDL) at the University of Toronto. His research combines automated chemistry, bioassays, and machine learning for peptide and peptidomimetic drug discovery. Before his faculty appointment, Joseph was a Staff Scientist with the MedChem SDL, helping build automated assays and models for the navigation of chemical space for the discovery and optimization of therapeutic candidates. He was previously a PhRMA Foundation Drug Discovery Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Bradley Pentelute. Though he led projects in phage display, medicinal chemistry, and automated chemical synthesis of proteins, Joseph specialized in combining machine learning (deep and unsupervised) with affinity selection-mass spectrometry (AS-MS) to identify high-affinity ligands from diverse peptide and abiotic libraries. Joseph earned his PhD in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University with Chris Alabi as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His doctoral work combined organic chemistry and biological characterization to design and evaluate antimicrobial peptidomimetics, establishing mechanistic and structure-activity relationships that continue to inform his approach to molecular design.