Faculty

Dr. Andy Beyer (she/her) is a first generation college student who was born and raised in rural Western Pennsylvania. She received her B.S. in Genetic Engineering with a chemistry minor in 2004 from Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA. She began conducting research her freshman year, investigating viruses called “bacteriophage” from soil and water samples. Upon graduation, she joined the graduate program at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, PA, where she earned her Ph.D. in Microbiology & Immunology. Her thesis was on host-pathogen interactions of retroviruses (such as Mouse Mammary Tumor Virus and Rous Sarcoma Virus), specifically looking at cellular trafficking of viral proteins.

After graduating in 2011, Dr. Beyer moved to VA for her post-doctoral training as part of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award (IRACDA) program. Over her 5 years as a post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Beyer studied the proteins of intracellular bacteria that transmit disease through tick and chigger bites. She started her teaching career in undergrad, serving as a teaching assistant in biology for 3.5 years. In graduate school, she taught biology and microbiology to medical, graduate, nursing, and high school students. During her IRACDA post-doc, she continued teaching microbiology to graduate and dental students as an affiliate faculty member, and completed a one-semester teaching externship at Virginia Union University.

After her time at VCU, Dr. Beyer joined the biology faculty at Virginia State University. There, she taught undergraduate biology, microbiology, and virology for 8 years, and studied bacteriophage with first-year students through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s SEA-PHAGES program (seaphages.org). She won the inaugural VSU Outstanding Faculty Award for Teaching, and has assisted in the discovery, sequencing, and genome annotation of 7 novel viruses with VSU first-year students.

Dr. Beyer joined the faculty at Richard Bland College in fall 2024. She brings with her over 20 years of teaching and research experience, and a passion for sharing biology with students (especially in the laboratory).