Emery N. Brown

Emery Neal Brown (* 1957 in Ocala , Florida ) is an American anesthetist and neuroscientist (neuroinformatics, statistics).

Life

Brown grew up in Ocala and attended Phillips Exeter Academy . He graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree magna cum laude in applied mathematics in 1978. He then studied mathematics at Grenoble University (Fourier Institute) and statistics at Harvard (AM 1984), but then turned to medicine, which he also did studied at Harvard. He received his MD in 1987 and his PhD in Statistics (Ph.D.) from Harvard in 1988. He completed his internship at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston until 1989 and his specialist training as anesthetist at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) until 1992 , where he then worked as an anesthetist (with simultaneous employment at Harvard Medical School) . In 2005 he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is also a professor at MIT and Harvard Medical School. He is Associate Director of MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Director of MIT's Neuroscience Statistics Research Laboratory, and Director of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program. Brown is Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and of Computational Neuroscience at MIT and Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. He is also still an anesthetist at MGH and researcher at MIT's Picower Center for Learning and Memory.

plant

He investigated the coding of information in the rate of fire of neurons in the brain, for example the representation of spatial information in the hippocampus and changes in neural activity in the hippocampus during procedural learning. He examined the periods of the internal clock and its sensitivity to light - whereby he showed that the phase of the internal clock can be shifted by precisely timed, bright light signals and dark phases. He also showed that the internal clock period was close to 24 hours and not 25, as is often reported. He investigated how groups of motor neurons represent movement, improved signal processing in functional MRI and developed methods to determine the dynamics of neuronal locations Localize activity in EEG and MEG . To this end, he develops special signal processing algorithms and statistical analysis methods (for state-space point processes , SSPP) in his laboratory .

He researches the general neuronal mechanisms of general anesthesia in anesthesia with the aim of a neurophysiological definition of this state of consciousness, better anesthetics and methods to determine the depth of anesthesia. He showed that general anesthesia is more of a reversible coma than a form of sleep. The anesthetics generate highly structured oscillations between brain regions, which are visible in the EEG and which interrupt normal communication between the brain regions. He specifically examined the effect of propofol in anesthesia and showed that it generates two oscillations: strong coherent alpha oscillations of 8 to 10 Hz between the cortex and thalamus and strong incoherent slow oscillations in the cortex with periods below 1 Hz. The former interrupt the Communication between the cortex and thalamus, the latter restricting communication within the cortex. Each anesthetic has specific EEG signatures and neural circuitry through which it works, and there are differences depending on the age of the patient and the dose of the anesthetic. As Brown demonstrated, the EEG signals can be used in real time by the anesthetist to analyze the state of anesthesia. According to Brown, the anesthetized state can be quickly reversed by administering methylphenidate (Ritalin) or by activating the dopaminergic system. He developed a neurophysiological model of the suppression of bursts (for example in general anesthesia, hypothermia , coma and artificial coma , various congenital brain defects) with application, for example, to the control of an artificial coma.

Honors and memberships

In 2018 he received the Dickson Prize in Science , he received the Director's Pioneer Award (2007, as first anesthetist, for A Systems Neuroscience Approach to the Study of General Anesthesia ) and Director's Transformative Research Award from the NIH , and in 2011 the Jerome Sacks Award from the National Institute of Statistical Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2014), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012), the National Academy of Engineering (2015), Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering , the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2007), Member of the Institute of Medicine , Fellow of IEEE (2008), Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and American Statistical Association . He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015 and received the American Society of Anesthesiologists Award for Excellence in Research (2015).

Fonts (selection)

• with CA Czeisler u. a .: Bright light induction of strong (type 0) resetting of the human circadian pacemaker , Science, Volume 244, 1989, pp. 1328-1333, PMID 2734611 .
• with CA Czeisler u. a .: Exposure to bright light and darkness to treat physiologic maladaptation to night work , The New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 322, 1990, pp. 1253-1259, PMID 2325721 .
• with CA Czeisler: The statistical analysis of circadian phase and amplitude in constant-routine core-temperature data , Journal of Biological Rhythms, Volume 7, 1992, pp. 177-202, PMID 1421473 .
• with LM Frank, D. Tang, MC Quirk, MA Wilson: A statistical paradigm for neural spike train decoding applied to position prediction from ensemble firing patterns of rat hippocampal place cells , Journal of Neuroscience, Volume 18, 1998, pp 7411-7425 , PMID 9736661 .
• with CA Czeisler u. a .: Stability, precision, and near-24-hour period of the human circadian pacemaker , Science, Volume 284, 1999, pp. 2177-2181, PMID 10381883
• with CA Czeisler u. a .: A statistical model of the human core-temperature circadian rhythm , American Journal of Physiology. Endocrinology and Metabolism, Volume 279, 2000, E669-683. PMID 10950837 .
• with D. P: Nguyen, LM Frank, MA Wilson, V. Solo: An analysis of neural receptive field plasticity by point process adaptive filtering , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Volume 98, 2001, p. 12261– 12266, PMID 11593043 .
• with LM Frank, UT Eden, V. Solo, MA Wilson: Contrasting patterns of receptive field plasticity in the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex: an adaptive filtering approach , Journal of Neuroscience, Volume 22, 2002, pp. 3817-3830, PMID 11978857 .
• with AC Smith: Estimating a state-space model from point process observations , Neural Computation, Volume 15, 2003, pp. 965-991, PMID 12803953 .
• with LM Frank, GB Stanley: Hippocampal plasticity across multiple days of exposure to novel environments , Journal of Neuroscience, Volume 24, 2004, pp. 7681-7689, PMID 15342735 .
• with AC Smith, LM Frank, S. Wirth, M. Yanike, D. Hu, Y. Kubota, AM Graybiel, WA Suzuki: Dynamic analysis of learning in behavioral experiments , Journal of Neuroscience, Volume 24, 2004, p. 447– 461, PMID 14724243 .
• with W. Truccolo, UT Eden, MR Fellows, JP Donoghue: A point process framework for relating neural spiking activity to spiking history, neural ensemble, and extrinsic covariate effects , Journal of Neurophysiology, Volume 93, 2005. pp. 1074-1089, PMID 15356183 .
• with R. Lydic, ND Schiff: General anesthesia, sleep, and coma , New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 363, 2010, pp. 2638-2650, PMID 21190458 .
• with S. Ching u. a .: Thalamocortical model for a propofol-induced alpha-rhythm associated with loss of consciousness , Proc National Academy of Sciences USA, Volume 107, 2010, pp. 22665-22670
• with PL Purdon, CJ Van Dort: General anesthesia and altered states of arousal: a systems neuroscience analysis , Annual Review of Neuroscience, Volume 34, 2011, pp. 601-628, PMID 21513454 .
• with K. Solt u. a .: Methylphenidate actively induces emergence from general anesthesia , Anesthesiology, Volume 115, 2011, pp. 791-803, PMID 21934407 .
• with A. Cimenser a. a .: racking brain states under general anesthesia by using global coherence analysis , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Volume 108, 2011, pp. 8832-8837, PMID 21555565 .
• with LD Lewis a. a .: Rapid fragmentation of neuronal networks at the onset of propofol-induced unconsciousness , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Volume 109, 2012, pp. 3377-3386, PMID 23129622 .
• with PL Purdon u. a .: Electroencephalogram signatures of loss and recovery of consciousness from propofol , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Volume 110, 2012, pp. 1142-1151, PMID 23487781 .
• with J. Chemali, S. Ching, PL Purdon, K. Solt: Burst suppression probability algorithms: state-space methods for tracking EEG burst suppression , Journal of Neural Engineering, Volume 10, 2013, p. 056017, PMID 24018288 .
• with Kara Pavone, Marusa Naranjo: Multimodal General Anesthesia: Theory and Practice, Anesthesia & Analgesia, Volume 127, 2018, pp. 1246–1258

Web links

• Website at MIT
• Website at the Picower Institute
• Jeanine P. Wiener-Kronish: Emery N. Brown, MD, Ph.D., Recipient of the 2015 Excellence in Research Award , Anesthesiology, Volume 123, October 2015, pp. 759-762.