Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D.

Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia, Harvard Medical School

SFARI Scientific Advisory Board Website

Emery N. Brown is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School; and a practicing anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. He received his B.A. (magna cum laude) in applied mathematics from Harvard College, his M.A. and his Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University and his M.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Medical School.

Brown is an anesthesiologist-statistician whose experimental research has made important contributions toward understanding the neuroscience of how anesthetics act in the brain to create the states of general anesthesia. In his statistics research, he has developed signal-processing algorithms to solve important data analysis challenges in neuroscience. His research has been featured on National Public Radio as well as in Scientific American, Technology Review and the New York Times.

He served on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) BRAIN Initiative Working Group, the NIH Council of Councils, 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 of CURE Epilepsy.  He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Simons Foundation, the Scientific Advisory Board of SFARI, and the Board of Trustees of the Guggenheim Foundation.

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine. He is the recipient of an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, the 2011 Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research from the National Institute of Statistical Science, the 2018 Dickson Prize in Science, and a Doctor of Science honoris causa from the University of Southern California.

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