Anne A. Madden (she/her) is an award-winning microbiologist, entrepreneur, and 5x TED/TEDx speaker. She recieved her B.A. in Biological Sciences at Wellesley College before receiving her Ph.D. at Tufts University as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. She was then awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and continued postdoctoral training at CU Boulder and North Carolina State University. She is a former Adjunct Assistant Professor of Applied Ecology at NC State. Beyond her academic roles, Dr. Madden has been a founder, scientist, executive and consultant in the broader biotechnology industry.

Dr. Madden’s mission is to discover the world’s microbes and reveal the value of this microbial world around us. With a unique expertise in finding and growing microbes from the environment that do remarkable things, she has developed pioneering microbial technology in the fields of fermented foods and beverages, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture. Her research and creative science communication projects are frequently featured by major media outlets, including NPR, BBC, National Geographic Magazine, Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, Vice, The Verge, The Daily Beast, and PBS NewsHour.

As she worked with unicorn technology companies, leading research universities, venture capitalists, and students of all ages, she became increasingly frustrated that there were few organizations devoted to the discovery of these microbes AND to ethically revealing their value to the public. In 2020, she founded The Microbe Institute to meet this need. To unite the scientific rigor of academia and the ethics of an educational institution with the ambitious nimbleness of a startup. To reduce the institutional overhead of standard universities and nonprofits while increasing the impact of any effort. To engage the world in the world’s most important and exciting discoveries. To foster microbial discovery before it is too late.

With the rapid rate of habitat loss and the concurrent decline in funding for academic science research, we’re losing microbes with each lost species, habitat, and moment. We are simultaneously losing the life-saving medications, the pollution-ending enzymes, and the biological insights they may have contained. In a race against time, The Microbe Institute is here as a nonprofit organization to foster discovery and remind the world that even when it feels as if all hope is lost, we need only look to the microbes in our biological cosmos to remember that we are the living in the greatest age of discovery of all times.