Brandi Cossairt was born and raised in Miami, Florida. She is a first-generation college graduate, having obtained her B. S. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 2006. Brandi went on to pursue graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Professor Christopher C. Cummins and was awarded her Ph.D. in 2010. She then continued her academic career as an NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University between 2010 and 2012 working with Professor Jonathan Owen. Brandi joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington as an Assistant Professor in 2012 and was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure in 2018. She has received a number of awards for her research including a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and the National Fresenius Award from the American Chemical Society. Outside of the lab Brandi is an Associate Editor at the ACS journal Inorganic Chemistry and is the co-founder of the Chemistry Women Mentorship Network (ChemWMN).
