Among other things, he is known for Ken Brown's lemma in the theory of model categories.

[1] He is also the author of the book Cohomology of Groups (Graduate Texts in Mathematics 87, Springer, 1982).

[5] Brown earned his Ph.D. in 1971 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Daniel Quillen, with thesis Abstract Homotopy Theory and Generalized Sheaf Cohomology.

[10] An October 2010 conference entitled "Approaches to Group Theory" was held in his honor at Cornell.

[13] It was organized by his colleagues and former students, and led by the mathematicians Susan Hermiller, John Meier, Karen Vogtmann, and David Webb.