Casandra Brené Brown (born November 18, 1965) is an American academic and podcaster who is the Huffington Foundation's Brené Brown Endowed Chair at the University of Houston's Graduate College of Social Work and a visiting professor in management at the McCombs School of Business in the University of Texas at Austin.

[8] Brown has studied the topics of courage, vulnerability, shame, empathy, and leadership, which she has used to look at human connection and how it works.

[9] She has spent her research career as a professor at her alma mater, the University of Houston's Graduate College of Social Work.

[11][12][13][14] The talk "summarizes a decade of Brown's research on shame, framing her weightiest discoveries in self-deprecating and personal terms.

[18] Brown regularly works as a public speaker at private events and businesses, such as at Alain de Botton's School of Life[13] and at Google and Disney.

[20] Her most recent work, Atlas of the Heart, was published in November 2021, with the goal of helping readers expand their emotional vocabulary—the language they have to communicate their feelings.

Her 2024 essay titled “Not Looking Away: Thoughts on the Israel-Hamas War" was criticized for being too "corporate-friendly" and maintained a privileged point of view that ignored aspects of Palestinian people's existence under Israeli occupation.

In solo episodes, she tells stories from her life, explains learnings from her research, and supplements it with summaries of other related social science work.

Interview guests have included grief expert David Kessler, singer Alicia Keys, writer Glennon Doyle, and activist Tarana Burke who started the Me Too movement.

Brown is CEO of "The Daring Way", a professional training and certification program on the topics of vulnerability, courage, shame, and empathy.