Brandy Salmon
brandy.salmon@vt.edu
540-231-7860
Vice President for Innovation and Partnerships
With over 25 years of experience at the intersection of research and business, Salmon serves as the Vice President of Innovation & Partnerships for Virginia Tech. In this role, Salmon leads a cross functional team focused on building strategic partnerships with industry and foundation, engaging alumni in industry, enabling big ideas and transformational partnerships envisioned through the Creative Studio, commercializing technologies, starting new ventures, and driving economic growth. For the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, Salmon serves as a Strategic Advisor to ensure seamless connections between Virginia Tech and a one-of-a-kind place-based assets.
While at Virginia Tech, Salmon played a seminal role in working with leaders in the Commonwealth to attract Amazon’s HQ2 and launch Virginia Tech’s Innovation Campus, serving as the Managing Director from 2018-2020 and leading a cross-functional delivery team to set the vision for the campus and accomplish key milestones.
Prior to Virginia Tech, Salmon served as director for RTI’s Innovation Advisors, where she consulted for federal, corporate, and foundation clients to implement best practices in innovation, identify and evaluate new technologies and products, and develop commercialization strategies and partnerships. For the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Salmon led a global technology accelerator to deliver new technologies and products to places in the world where novel approaches are needed most, including Asia and Africa.
Salmon has a B.A. from the University of Virginia, with honors, a Ph.D. from Cornell University in Microbiology and Immunology, served as a Howard Hughes Post-doctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, and earned an M.B.A. from the Duke University Fuqua School of Business.
Salmon believes in the power of teams. “Everything we do at Virginia Tech is thanks to the dedication of talented people who live and breathe our mission of service and our partners who are an integral part of that. Together, we can change the world.”