AOAC OMB Nomination Review (June 12, 2019)

May 14, 2019

Brad Goskowicz President, AOAC International 2275 Research Blvd, Ste 300 Rockville, MD 20850-3250 USA

Dear President Goskowicz:

The purpose of this letter is to provide an enthusiastic recommendation in support of the candidacy of Dr. Paula N. Brown for a position on the AOAC International Official Methods Board (OMB). I met Dr. Brown in 2001 and she is an internationally recognized Natural Products Chemist who has long excelled in development and validation of analytical methods. Dr. Brown’s career began with training in organic synthesis of carbohydrates at Simon Frazier University and continued through a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of British Columbia. In 1999, Dr. Brown established and now directs the Natural Health and Food Products Research Group (NRG) at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), where the Director's position is equivalent to the academic rank of Associate Dean. The BCIT is an academic institution devoted to research and training in translational and public/private partnerships. The program has a focus on the basic and applied science underlying natural health product (NHP) and dietary supplement quality and the roles that these products can play in human health. The program has been dedicated from the start to developing novel tools for characterizing herbs to support preclinical and clinical studies. Dr. Brown is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair (similar to the U.S. National Academies of Science, a highly prestigious recognition by her academic peers) and holds a number of academic and policy appointments. An accomplished author and researcher, Dr. Brown’s program has been actively supporting the Canadian Natural Health Product and U.S. Dietary Supplement industries for two decades through applied and basic research activities, including projects that involve product development, analytical method validation, isolation and characterization of compounds, establishment of quality standards, and regulatory compliance. The primary research activities of the NRG focus on chemical evaluations of botanicals and formulations with particular emphasis on quality assurance and analysis of biological fluids to support therapeutic monitoring. Over the course of her career, Dr. Brown has been an avid AOAC volunteer. She was a member of the AOAC President's Task Force on Dietary Supplements (2005 – 2010) and was AOAC General Referee for Dietary Supplements from 2005 – 2009. She has been a stakeholder in the Dietary Supplements Working Group as well as participating on numerous expert review panels (ERP). She is a Fellow of AOAC International and has twice been the recipient of the AOAC ERP of the year award (2011, 2017). She is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of AOAC International, and in 2018, she took on the job of section editor for dietary supplements and natural products for the Journal. Dr. Brown has developed, optimized, and validated analytical methods and applied them to monitoring the supplement and NHP marketplace. She has pioneered development of methods and has used all the resources at her disposal to perform thorough phytochemical investigations of target constituents and to understand the metabolic pathways necessary to predict important metabolites that could become the subjects of new chromatographic methods. In addition to her other AOAC volunteer activities, Dr. Brown has written protocols for, performed, directed and published at least 24 single-laboratory and collaborative validation studies. In all, the studies she has conducted have led to about a dozen AOAC Official Methods of Analysis, with more in progress. She is an expert chemist, statistician, and chemometrician and I do not know another scientist in the natural products field who has come close to her level of productivity. I know that I could fill several more sheets with accounts of Dr. Brown's outstanding qualifications. Please accept this hearty recommendation, and should you require any further information, please feel free to contact me at (301) 435- 6044 (e-mail: betzj@od.nih.gov ).

Sincerely,

Joseph M. Betz, Ph.D. Acting Director, NIH Office of Dietary Supplements