She was the first woman to receive the Leo A. Goodman Award for "an outstanding researcher within 10 years of their Ph.D." from the American Sociological Association (ASA).
[4] Until 2021, she chaired the Methodology Section of the ASA,[5] currently chairs the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the ASA,[6] and sits on the boards of the International Sociological Association's Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility, the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Longitudinal Surveys Program Technical Review Committee, and the General Social Survey.
[7] Brand has made notable empirical contributions in the subfields of social stratification and the sociology of education.
In an influential 2010 study of returns to higher education, Brand and Yu Xie challenge the conventional economistic view that comparative advantage would make the individuals with the most to gain from a college degree more likely to seek one out.
She has published extensively on treatment effect heterogeneity and propensity score matching.