[1][2] Brace matriculated in 1943 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and after 1944–1946 service in the Navy, graduated with bachelor's degrees in 1946 in naval architecture and in 1949 in civil engineering.
With James Byerlee of Stanford University, Brace realized that the stick-slip friction events observed in the laboratory could be used to understand ruptures occurring at much larger scale during destructive earthquakes.
In a long and fruitful collaboration with Joseph Walsh of MIT, Brace used careful experiments, thorough mechanical analyses, and thoughtful observations of microstucture to develop a systematic constitutive description of such physical properties of rocks as acoustic wave velocity, electrical resistivity and permeability.
... With MIT’s Christopher Goetze and other collaborators, Brace showed that data from mechanical tests could be used to produce a simple, quantitative description of the strength of the Earth’s crust.
In 1987 he received the Bucher Medal of the American Geophysical Union and the Distinguished Achievement Award from the U.S. National Committee on Rock Mechanics.