Emery N. Brown, the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Associate Director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT, has won Carnegie Mellon University’s 2018 Dickson Prize in Science.

“Dr. Brown is one of the world’s leading physician-scientists,” Carnegie Mellon said in the award announcement. He is among just 21 people elected to all three branches of the National Academies of Science. He is considered the world’s expert on statistical analysis of neuronal data, according to CMU faculty member Robert E. Kass, and his research on anesthesia has been “truly transformative” to that field.

He directs an interdisciplinary team comprised of anesthesiologists, neuroscientists, bioengineers, mathematicians, neurologists and a neurosurgeon from MGH, MIT and Boston University that is deciphering the neuroscience of general anesthesia, CMU’s announcement noted. Brown also directs the Neuroscience Statistics Research Laboratory at MGH and MIT where the research develops statistical methods and signal processing algorithms to analyze data collected in neuroscience experiments.

In accepting the award, Brown credited the many people he has worked with at MGH, MIT, BU, and Harvard. “I am extremely honored to receive the 2018 Dickson Prize in Science and to join the esteemed ranks of its past recipients,” he said. “I am especially grateful to all of the many students, post-docs and colleagues whose successful collaborations have led to this recognition.”

See https://www.cmu.edu/dickson-prize/