Emery N. Brown

Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D. is the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School, a Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Brown is the Director of the Neuroscience Statistics Research Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the co-director of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and an associate director of M.I.T.'s Institute for Medical Engineering & Science.^[1] Brown also works as a doctor in the department of anesthesiology, critical care and pain medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.^[2] In 2007, Brown was one of the recipients of the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award.^[3] Brown is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences.

Education and career

Brown completed his B.A. in applied mathematics at Harvard College in 1978.^[1] He went on to pursue an A.M. in statistics from Harvard University, completing his degree in 1984.^[1] In the next four years, Brown earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School (1987) and completed his Ph.D. in statistics at Harvard in 1988.^[1]

Brown is the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, a Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.^[1] In addition to his professorial positions, Brown serves as the Director of the Neuroscience Statistics Research Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an associate director of M.I.T.'s Institute for Medical Engineering & Science and the co-director of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, which "bring[s] together MIT engineers and scientists with physicians at Harvard Medical School."^[1][4] Brown also works as a doctor in the department of anesthesiology, critical care and pain medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.^[2]

Honors and awards

Brown was selected as one of the recipients of the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award in 2007, Brown was awarded these research funds to use "a systems neuroscience approach to study how anesthetic drugs act in the brain to create the state of general anesthesia."^[5] The National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award is designed to support "individual scientists of exceptional creativity, who propose pioneering – and possibly transforming approaches – to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research," the award provides $500,000 per year for five years to each winner.^[6][7]

Brown is a member of the National Academy of Sciences,^[8] the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Statistical Association, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.^[1] Brown is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.^[1]

Research area

Brown, as well as the Neuroscience Statistics Research Laboratory headed by him, have two primary research areas. The first research area for Brown and his lab is "the development of statistical methods and signal-processing algorithms for neuroscience data analysis."^[9] Brown, and the members of his lab, have used these methods and algorithms to analyse large data sets of signals from neural systems. Brown and his team have used their methods for applications like: "measur[ing] the period of the circadian pacemaker (human biological clock) and its sensitivity to light", "improv[ing] signal extraction from fMR imaging time-series" and "relat[ing] changes in hippocampal neural activity to changes in performance during procedural learning."^[9]

The second major research focus for Brown and his team is "to establish a neurophysiological definition of anesthesia, safer, site-specific anesthetic drugs and to develop better neurophysiologically-based methods for measuring depth of anesthesia."^[9] This research, for which he was awarded the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award to pursue, "use[s] a systems neuroscience approach to study how the state of general anesthesia is induced and maintained."^[9] Brown's "systems neuroscience approach" employs disparate techniques like "fMRI, EEG, neurophysiological recordings, microdialysis methods and mathematical modeling."^[9] An example of this interdisciplinary approach is can be seen in a paper, co-published by Brown, entitled: "Simultaneous electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging of general anesthesia." The paper lays out "a paradigm for conducting combined fMRI and EEG studies of human subjects under general anesthesia"^[10] and explains why the combination of two techniques could be helpful in an explanation of general anesthesia: "combined fMRI and EEG offers a direct way to relate established EEG patterns induced by general anesthesia to changes in neural activity in specific brain regions as measured by changes in fMRI blood oxygen level dependent signals."^[10]

Selected Publications

• Czeisler, C. A.; Duffy, JF; Shanahan, TL; Brown, EN; Mitchell, JF; Rimmer, DW; Ronda, JM; Silva, EJ; Allan, JS; Emens, JS; Dijk, DJ; Kronauer, RE (1999). "Stability, Precision, and Near-24-Hour Period of the Human Circadian Pacemaker". Science 284 (5423): 2177–81. doi:10.1126/science.284.5423.2177. PMID 10381883. 
• Brown, Emery N; Kass, Robert E; Mitra, Partha P (2004). "Multiple neural spike train data analysis: State-of-the-art and future challenges". Nature Neuroscience 7 (5): 456–61. doi:10.1038/nn1228. PMID 15114358. 
• Frank, L; Brown, EN; Wilson, M (2000). "Trajectory Encoding in the Hippocampus and Entorhinal Cortex". Neuron 27 (1): 169–78. doi:10.1016/S0896-6273(00)00018-0. PMID 10939340. 
• Schwartz, Robert S.; Lydic, Emery N.; Schiff, Ralph; Schiff, Nicholas D. (2010). "General Anesthesia, Sleep, and Coma". New England Journal of Medicine 363 (27): 2638–50. doi:10.1056/NEJMra0808281. PMC 3162622. PMID 21190458. 
• Brown, E. N.; Nguyen, D. P.; Frank, L. M.; Wilson, M. A.; Solo, V. (2001). "An analysis of neural receptive field plasticity by point process adaptive filtering". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (21): 12261. doi:10.1073/pnas.201409398. 

References

External links

• Emery Brown's Profile from M.I.T.
• The Neuroscience Statistics Research Lab's Home Page
• Emery Brown's Publications