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Emery Brown

(1957 - )

Statistician, Neuroscientist, Anesthesiologist, National Academy of Sciences Member, National Academy of Engineering Member, National Academy of Medicine Member

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Emery N. Brown is the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and a professor of computational neuroscience, the associate director of the Institute for Medical Engineering, the co-director of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program, and an investigator in the Picower Institute.

Dr. Brown received his B.A. (magna cum laude) in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College, his M.A. and Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University, and his M.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Medical School. He completed his internship in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and his residency in anesthesiology at MGH. He joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 1992 and at MIT in 2005. Dr. Brown is the only person to hold endowed professorships at both Harvard and MIT.

Dr. Brown is an anesthesiologist-statistician whose experimental research has made important contributions towards understanding the neuroscience of how anesthetics act in the brain to create the states of general anesthesia. In particular, his work has shown that highly structures oscillation maintained by the anesthetic drugs are a primary mechanism through which anesthetics create the altered arousal states of general anesthesia. His statistics research has developed signal processing algorithms to help understand how the brain represents and transmits information.

Dr. Brown served on President Obama's BRAIN Initiative Working Group, and is currently a member of the National Science Foundation Mathematics and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee, the Board of Directors of the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund, the Board of Trustees of the International Anesthesia Research Society, and the Scientific Advisory Committee for CURE Epilepsy.

Dr. Brown is the recipient of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's Pioneer Award, an NIH Director's Transformative Research Award, the Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research from the National Institute of Statistical Science, and the American Society of Anesthesiologists Excellence in Research Award.

Dr. Brown is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a Guggenheim Fellow in Applied Mathematics, and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the IEEE. Dr. Brown is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine. He is the first African American, the first statistician, and the first anesthesiologist to be elected to all three branches of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Additional Information

Biography from Wikipedia

Profile from MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering Science

Video Presentation at the National Academy of Sciences: Emery N. Brown, "Dynamics of the Unconsciousness under General Anesthesia"  

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