Brown (born in 1961, Ontario) is a Canadian geneticist and Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia.
Brown is known for her studies on X-chromosome inactivation, having discovered the human XIST gene in 1990.
These two topics converged in the 1990 discovery of the XIST gene, which localizes to the X-inactivation center and is expressed solely from the inactive X chromosome.
[3] Brown became Research Associate in 1990 in the Stanford Department of Genetics, and two years later moved with Willard’s laboratory to the Department of Genetics of Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, where she continued studying the XIST long noncoding RNA.
[10] Her lab collaborates with other research groups at the B. C. Children’s Hospital and the BC Cancer Agency to investigate the clinical relevance of X-linked inactivation and expression in disease predisposition, cancer progression, and X-linked diseases, chromosome rearrangements and aneuploidies.