Jeffrey Brown II

Jeffrey Brown II wants to develop novel computational and biological tools for seeing and controlling biological systems and create new computational methods to find the hidden principles within the data.

He is a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in electrical engineering/computer science and a member of the Synthetic Neurobiology Group led by Professor Ed Boyden (Hertz Fellow).

Brown envisions using these first principles to develop a mature landscape for molecular neural engineering — tools and techniques to interface with the brain down to the level of single molecules. With such methods, he hopes to tackle understanding the brain and curing neuropsychiatric diseases from the ground up.

Brown was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and raised in Maryland. He completed his undergrad at Stanford University with a bachelor’s in philosophy, a master’s in computer science, and a master’s in electrical engineering.

As an undergraduate, Brown found and nurtured a passion for neural engineering. He worked on the Stanford Artificial Retina Project, an initiative to restore vision through retinal prostheses. During his tenure, he developed algorithms to control individual neurons through electrical stimulation.