In 2014, he was named to head the Marine Biological Laboratory, and is a professor in human genetics at the University of Chicago.
[4] Earlier, beginning in 2003 he was the Nanaline H. Duke Professor of Genome Sciences, the first director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, and Vice Chancellor for Genome Sciences at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.
He did a postdoctoral fellowship in medical genetics at Johns Hopkins University from 1979-81.
[5] His current research interests include genome sciences and their broad implications for medicine and society, human chromosome structure and function, X-inactivation and mechanisms of gene silencing, and the first reported development of human artificial chromosomes for studies of gene transfer and functional genomics.
Brown led to the discovery of the human XIST gene, the long noncoding RNA associated with the inactive X chromosome.