People

Prof. Brown read Medical Engineering at QUT, Australia, receiving the Best Overall Engineering Project prize for his honours project design of an anechoic and electromagnetically modulated test chamber for hearing aid telecoils. He returned for his PhD, and was awarded the University’s Outstanding Thesis prize for 2008. Prof. Brown then joined the Italy-Québéc Joint Laboratory in Nanostructured Materials for Energy, Catalysis and Biomedical Applications, working in Rome and Montreal. As a FRSQ Fellow, he led an investigation into spider silk nanomechanics, particularly toughening mechanisms related to protein-water interactions, protein distribution and fibril interactions. In addition to its outstanding mechanical properties, the green chemistry and scalability of spider silk synthesis provide an excellent biomimetic target for the development of biomaterials and other high performance fibre-based materials.

From 2010 to 2017 Prof. Brown worked at the Botnar Research Centre, University of Oxford most recently as Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Materials. Supported by an ARUK Career Development Fellowship and a NIHR-BRC Senior Fellowship he set up and led the Photonics, Mechanics and Modelling of Biomedical Materials Group. In this time he was also the Oxford lead for the Marie Curie skelGEN Project, the image analysis lead for the 7-Tesla MSK Imaging Programme, and the engineering lead for the ARUK Experimental Osteoarthritis Treatment Centre.

In November 2017, Prof. Brown returned to QUT to take up a chair in biomedical engineering, and directorship of the Medical Engineering Research Facility, maintaining an honorary position at Oxford. Prof. Brown’s research interests are in the structure-property-function relationships in high-performance natural materials; biological physics; laser-tissue interactions; and nanometre to millimetre scale mechanics and electromechanics. His applied research interests are in surgical nano/microrockets; accessible medical device design; diagnostic and therapeutic technologies; nanoscale devices; biomimetic materials development and surgical optimisation.