Emery N. Brown, MD, PhD

Clinical Care and Research Activities: Dr. Brown’s primary clinical care activities are delivering direct anesthesia care and supervising anesthesiology residents on the General Surgery Service at Massachusetts General Hospital. In his experimental research Dr. Brown uses fMRI, EEG, neurophysiological recordings, signal processing methods and mathematical modeling in interdisciplinary collaborations with investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Health Sciences and Technology Program and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and at Boston University to study how anesthetic drugs act in the brain to create the state of general anesthesia. The long-term goal of this research is to establish a neurophysiological definition of general anesthesia, safer, site-specific anesthetic drugs and to develop better neurophysiologically-based methods of tracking the states of the brain under general anesthesia. In his statistical research Dr. Brown develops signal processing algorithms and statistical methods to study how the brain represents and transmits information. He has used the methods to characterize the dynamics of neural activity in the hippocampus during learning, measure the period of the human circadian pacemaker (biological clock), characterize the dynamics of learning and behavioral changes from binary-time series, designing algorithms for neural prosthetic control, improve signal extraction for two-photo calcium imaging, fMRI, EEG and MEG recordings, and characterize the dynamics of human heart beats. Dr. Brown’s unique experiences as a practicing anesthesiologist, statistician and neuroscientist bring important breadth and perspective to the SmartTots Scientific Advisory Board.