His research centered on the morphology of plants and was a very influential teacher who worked as a professor of botany at the universities of Freiburg, Giessen, and Berlin at various times.

His teachers included Gottlieb Wilhelm Bischoff, Johann Heinrich Dierbach and Franz Joseph Schelver.

With Gottlob Ludwig Rabenhorst (1806–1881) and Ernst Stizenberger (1827–1895), he was editor of the exsiccata series Die Characeen Europa's in getrockneten Exemplaren, unter Mitwirkung mehrerer Freunde der Botanik, gesammelt und herausgegeben von Prof. A. Braun, L. Rabenhorst und E.

[4] He was a proponent of vitalism, a popular 19th-century speculative theory that claimed that a regulative force existed within living matter in order to maintain functionality.

[5][6][7] From his 1830s analysis of the arrangement of scales on a pine cone he was a pioneer of mathematical phyllotaxis developing what is called the Schimper-Braun theory.