Melissa Brown

SENIOR RESEARCH PROJECT MANAGER AND FOUNDING BOARD MEMBER

Melissa Brown is the Senior Research Project Manager and Founding Board Member of the Black Researchers Collective (BRC). She previously served as the community trainer for the BRC where she helped to train and equip Black communities on the South and West Side of Chicago with research tools to be more civically engaged and policy informed. Brown is also the Co-Founder of the #BlackTechFuture Research Institute  (#BTF) where she led and co-facilitated online monthly research trainings with over a dozen Fellows which include local black tech innovators, community organizations, educators from across 4 major Southern cities about the intersection of research, data, tech, and equity within their cities.

As an experienced researcher, Brown has conducted in-depth research and co-authored six reports focused on understanding the racial and tech inequity within Chicago’s, Philadelphia’s, Memphis’s, Nashville’s, Houston’, and Birmingham’s Black Tech Ecosystems. Brown is also a senior researcher at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) with more than 18 years of experience of conducting education focused research regionally and nationally and managing budgets of $2 million. She also has extensive experience triangulating data and rendering findings in easy to understand language to clients, partners, and external audiences. Brown graduated with a M.A. in Social Science from the University of Chicago.