[1] Brown studied forestry, systematic botany, and ecology at the University of Michigan in 1902, receiving his master's degree in 1903.
Early in his career, Brown studied plant distribution on the flood plain of the Huron River in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
He married biologist Elizabeth Dorothy Wuist on August 20 of the same year, and the two of them performed two years of field work on the Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bayard Dominick Expedition[2] to the Marquesas Islands (1921–1922), along with ethnologist Edward S. Handy and archeologist Ralph Lauton.
[3] Brown and his wife also visited the Tuamotu archipelago and New Zealand where they collected 9000 dried plant and 120 wood samples.
[4] In 1920, Brown was a research fellow at Yale when he became a staff botanist for the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii.