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The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) today presented Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D., with its 2015 Excellence in Research Award in recognition of his outstanding achievements that are significantly affecting the practice and science of anesthesiology. Dr. Brown is known for his experimental research on understanding how anesthetics act in the brain to create the states of general anesthesia.
Dr. Brown is the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School in Boston and the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. He is the only person to hold simultaneously endowed chairs at Harvard and MIT. Dr. Brown is also a practicing physician anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
As a physician anesthesiologist and statistician, Dr. Brown uses his expertise in neuroscience and mathematics to enrich clinical anesthesia. His research group was the first to establish that anesthetics create altered states of arousal by generating highly structured oscillations or rhythms in brain circuits that disrupt normal information transmission among different brain regions. Research in his group has also led to accurate approaches to monitoring patients while under general anesthesia or sedation using electroencephalography, which measures the electrical activity of the brain, and devising new approaches to precisely control, and induce emergence from, the anesthetic state.
Dr. Brown is recognized as one of the country’s leading experts in neuroscience data analysis. He served on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) BRAIN Initiative Working Group, charged by President Barack Obama to prepare a blueprint for technology development to catalyze discovery and innovation in neuroscience research.
“Dr. Brown’s forward-thinking and ability to combine anesthesiology, neurophysiology and statistical theory has provided new classifications of anesthesia-induced neuronal changes of the brain,” said ASA President J.P. Abenstein, M.S.E.E., M.D. “Not only is his research placing the delivery of anesthesia care on firm neuroscience footing, it will have a long-lasting impact on our patients, the specialty and other areas of clinical neuroscience.”
Dr. Brown completed his B.A. in applied mathematics at Harvard College (magna cum laude), his M.A. and Ph.D. in statistics at Harvard University and his M.D. (magna cum laude) at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Dr. Brown is the first and, until recently, the only student in Harvard’s M.D., Ph.D. program to receive his Ph.D. in statistics. He completed his residency in anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Dr. Brown holds leadership positions in numerous professional societies. He is currently on the board of trustees for the International Anesthesia Research Society (IARS) and serves on the IARS- FDA SmartTots Scientific Advisory Committee, which examines the safe use of anesthetics in children. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, American Statistical Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Academy of Arts Sciences. Dr. Brown is the first and only physician anesthesiologist to be elected a member of all three branches of the U.S. National Academies: the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine), National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering.
Dr. Brown’s honors include an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, and the Jerome Sacks Award from the National Institute of Statistical Science, among others. He is also the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s Fellowship in Applied Mathematics.
THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF ANESTHESIOLOGISTS
Founded in 1905, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) is an educational, research and scientific society with more than 52,000 members organized to raise and maintain the standards of the medical practice of anesthesiology. ASA is committed to ensuring physician anesthesiologists evaluate and supervise the medical care of patients before, during and after surgery to provide the highest quality and safest care every patient deserves.
For more information on the field of anesthesiology, visit the American Society of Anesthesiologists online at asahq.org. To learn more about the role physician anesthesiologists play in ensuring patient safety, visit asahq.org/WhenSecondsCount. Join the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2015 social conversation today. Like ASA on Facebook, follow ASALifeline on Twitter and use the hashtag #ANES2015.
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