He was a student of Julian Schwinger at Harvard University and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Brown again visited Imperial College in 1971-1972, continuing his research with a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Pierre Ramond's review in Science states that Brown's book is "marked by its astute choice of topics as well as by the clarity with which they are expounded, it is akin to a toolbox for students of modern quantum field theory... a very thorough and rare treatment...a very interesting and original textbook.
Brown and collaborators computed the energy–energy correlation in electron–positron annihilation (Basham et al. 1978), which provides one method of measuring the strong interaction QCD coupling constant.
At the University of Washington, Hans Dehmelt captured single charged particles in very stable orbits in a Penning trap.
This arrangement, called geonium, enabled measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron with exquisite precision for which Dehmelt won the Nobel Prize.