Previously, Brand served as the assistant provost of faculty appointments and information at Harvard University and as a vice president at Digital Science.
[2] Brand received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in linguistics from Barnard College in 1985 and a Doctor of Philosophy in cognitive science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989.
[3] She was instrumental in developing CogNet, MIT Press's digital cognitive science collection – one of the first online academic communities of its kind.
[7] Brand currently serves on the boards of several information and media organizations, including the International Science Council, Creative Commons, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Coolidge Corner Theater Foundation.
[9] Brand was executive producer of the documentary Picture a Scientist, a 2020 selection of the Tribeca Film Festival that highlights gender inequality in science.