Andrea Brand FRS FMedSci is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology and a Fellow of Jesus College at the University of Cambridge. She heads a lab investigating nervous system development[1][2] at the Gurdon Institute [3] and the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. She developed the GAL4/UAS system with Norbert Perrimon (Development. 1993 Jun;118(2):401-15) [4], which has been described as “a fly geneticist's Swiss army knife” [5]. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation. She was awarded the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award in 2006 [6].