Sarah S. Brown

Sarah Brown is the Director of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, a private and independent initiative organized in 1996 to reduce the teenage pregnancy rate by one-third by 2005. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford University and the University of North Carolina. Before co-founding the National Campaign with Isabel Sawhill, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, she was a senior study director at the Institute of Medicine (a component of the National Academy of Sciences) where, among other projects, she completed a major study on unintended pregnancy, which resulted in the report, "The Best Intentions: Unintended Pregnancy and the Well-Being of Children and Families." Other projects at the Institute that she directed centered on health care reform, substance abuse among pregnant women, access to prenatal care, and preventing low birth weight.

She serves on the boards of many organizations, including the Alan Guttmacher Institute and the District of Columbia's Mayor's Advisory Board on Teenage Pregnancies and Out-of-Wedlock Births. In addition, she is a member of numerous committees and advisory groups, such as the Early Life and Adolescent Health Policy Working Group of Harvard University, the advisory councils of Teen People magazine, the Department of Maternal and Child Health at Johns Hopkins University, and the Division of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at the Institute of Medicine.

Brown has received numerous awards, including the Institute of Medicine's Cecil Award for Excellence in Research, the John MacQueen Award for Excellence in Maternal and Child Health from the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs, the Harriet Hylton Barr Distinguished Service Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Martha May Elliot Award of the American Public Health Association, and the Spirit of Service Award from the National Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Parenting, and Prevention. She is married to Winthrop Brown and lives in Washington, D.C. The Browns have three daughters, ages 14, 18, and 21.