Photo of Emery Neal Brown

Emery Neal Brown

  • National Medal of Science
  • Medicine

For his revolutionary contributions to neuroscience and anesthesiology. Emery Brown’s neuroscientific approach to understanding anesthesia’s exact impact on the brain has been transformational for relieving patient suffering and has provided a new foundation for how we think about the very thing that makes us human—our consciousness.

Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D. is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering andComputational Neuroscience at MIT; the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at HarvardMedical School; and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Brown’s recent research has focused on deciphering the neurophysiology of how anesthetics create altered arousal states such as unconscious. He and his colleagues have established that a principal way that anesthetics produce unconsciousness is by shifting the brain’s intrinsic oscillations (field potentials) from generally high- frequency low-amplitude oscillations to low-frequency high- amplitude oscillations. This change in brain dynamics significantly impairs communication among brain regions, leading to unconsciousness. These anesthesia-mediated oscillations are easily visible in the electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of patients under general anesthesia. They change systematically with anesthetic drug class, drug dose, patient age and patient health status. Brown has shown that real-time EEG recordings can be used to monitor unconsciousness, guide drug dosing in a neurophysiogically-based manner and implement closed-loop control systems for precise maintenance of anesthetic state.

In his early career, Brown developed statistical models to characterize the intrinsic properties of the human circadian clock. These included characterizing the human phase-response curve to light; measuring accurately the period of the human circadian clock; and measuring the adaption of shiftworkers to work schedules designed using circadian physiology. Brown later devised methods for analyzing neurophysiology data, focusing primarily on decoding signal representations in ensemble neural spiking activity and measuring how neural activity evolves during learning.

Brown served on President Obama’s Brain Initiative Working Group. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and the American Philosophical Society.

Brown has received an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Applied Mathematics, the American Society of Anesthesiologists Excellence in Research Award, the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, and Doctors of Science Honoris Causa from the USC and SUNY Downstate

Arati Prabhakar, Ph.D., Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), awards Emery N. Brown the National Medal of Science during an awards ceremony at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, January 3, 2025. Photo by Ryan K. Morris