Amy Brown Gagnon

Bio

Amy Brown Gagnon is the director of the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, located on the Centennial Campus of NC State in Raleigh. As director of LAS, she works with government, academic and industry partners to research and implement solutions to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s strategic analysis challenges. She is a career employee of the National Security Agency (NSA), where she is a Defense Intelligence Senior Leader.

Brown Gagnon graduated from The Pennsylvania State University with a bachelor’s degree in French and business. Throughout her intelligence community career of nearly four decades, she has continuously sought educational opportunities, gaining proficiency in three additional languages and pursuing graduate studies in organizational design and leadership at Duquesne University and Colorado State. 

For more than 20 years, Brown Gagnon served in analysis-related roles, first focusing on Cold War era adversaries, later shifting to counter-terrorism, and eventually leading an analytic tradecraft organization, always with a foreign language foundation. She has also worked in a diverse cross-section of NSA support offices, including Policy, Foreign Affairs, and Equal Employment Opportunity, and she has served in two joint duty assignments, one at an Intelligence community partner agency and the other with United States Cyber Command. Most recently, as the NSA/CSS Senior Language Authority, Brown Gagnon led the 12,000 member military and civilian cryptologic language community, working to build language capacity in order to address current and future mission challenges.

During Brown Gagnon’s years working counter-terrorism, her teams were recognized with the Exceptional Achievement Medal, a National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Citation, and two Joint Meritorious Unit Awards. She is a 2011 recipient of the Director’s Individual Leadership Award and has also received the Meritorious Civilian Service Award.

Outside of work, Brown Gagnon and her husband enjoy playing and watching sports (especially Red Sox baseball and Penn State football), hiking, listening to live music of all sorts, and traveling. She has five children, two step-children, and four grandsons, including a set of twins, and a granddaughter.