Tom Brown

He co-founded three biotechnology companies: Oswel Research Products, ATDBio, and Primerdesign. As of January 2016, he is in the board of directors of last two.

As of January 2016, Brown has published more than 300 articles in peer-reviewed journals, with many of his papers appearing in highly selective journals like Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Cell, Nucleic Acids Research, JACS, and PNAS. His papers have been cited over 18,000 times and he has an h-index 68.

In 2005, Brown founded ATDBio with an aim to synthesize chemically modified oligonucleotides for technical applications. As of June 2014, this company maintains two different labs at Southampton and Oxford.

In 2004, Brown co-founded (along with two of his University of Southampton colleagues) Primerdesign, a company which designs and manufactures products for quantitative Real-time polymerase chain reaction. The company is best known for creating rapid Swine Flu detection kit in 2009, and for creating a test for the SARS-CoV-2 virus strain in 2020.

After these post-doctoral stints, he was appointed as a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh where he was subsequently promoted to the rank of Reader and then to Professor. In 1995, he moved to the University of Southampton where he worked as a Professor of Chemical Biology. In 2013, Brown again moved, to take up position of the Professor of Nucleic acid chemistry at the University of Oxford where he now holds a joint position at the Department of Chemistry and Department of Oncology. In 2014, he was elected as the President of the Chemical Biology Interface Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry for a term of three years.

While working at the University of Edinburgh, Brown founded Oswel Research Products (the name 'Oswel' came from "Oligonucleotide synthesis" and "Wellcome Trust"), a company which was dedicated to automated DNA synthesis. Later, in 1995, the company moved to Southampton, along with Brown. In the year 1999, when the company had turnover of GBP 2.2 million and a profit of GBP 0.7 million, Eurogentec acquired Oswel.

Brown was born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and attended Broadway Grammar School there. As an undergraduate student, he attended University of Bradford to study chemistry where he obtained his bachelor's degree with first class honours, and was awarded the Griffin and George Prize for being the most outstanding graduate. In 1979, he earned his PhD from the same university, under the supervision of Prof Gordon Shaw. He then carried out his post-doctoral research at the University of Nottingham (with Leslie Crombie and Gerry Pattenden), University of Oxford (with John Jones), and at the University of Cambridge (with Olga Kennard OBE FRS).

Tom Brown FRSC FRSE (born 10 November 1952) is a British chemist, biotechnologist, and entrepreneur. He is the Professor of Nucleic acid chemistry at the Department of Chemistry and Department of Oncology at the University of Oxford. Currently, he is serving as the President of the Chemical Biology Interface Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is best known for his contribution in the field of DNA Repair, DNA Click chemistry, and in the application of Molecular genetics in forensics and diagnostics.