Jeffrey Brown
Jeff Brown's teaching in undergraduate, graduate, and professional settings has included integrative and clinical neuroscience, neurophysiology, electrophysiological techniques, and drugs, behavior, and health.
- Neuroethology
- Neural network dynamics
- Biophysics
Jeff Brown’s research is organized around how neural networks in simple invertebrate brains configure themselves to optimize behavioral outputs, encode learning/memory, and give rise to volition and decision-making.
Originally from Framingham, MA, Jeff completed his bachelor’s degree in physics at Harvard University in 2005. After an elective course on the human brain he took as a senior catalyzed an abiding interest in neuroscience, Jeff would go on to complete a doctoral degree in biophysics and computational biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014, where his research centered on the neurophysiological bases of decision-making behavior.
A versatile educator who has amassed experiences in undergraduate, graduate, and medical school instruction, curricular design, professional education consultancy, and research mentorship over a period of 20 years, Jeff was proud to direct the first-year neuroscience course at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign, where he served on the faculty between 2014 and 2018. He moved to Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science (North Chicago, IL) in 2019 to pursue postdoctoral research in the research group of Dr. William Frost, where he utilized optical electrophysiology and computational approaches to study network dynamics in simple nervous systems. While at Rosalind Franklin, Jeff was privileged to contribute to lectures regularly in the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and to undergraduate courses at nearby Lake Forest College. On top of his full-time appointment at the Pennsylvania State University, he currently serves as an adjunct assistant professor at Rosalind Franklin’s College of Nursing, where he is the co-designer and co-director of a course in clinical neuroscience.
In his spare time, Jeff enjoys spending time with his wife Jill, an elementary school teacher, and their eight (!) cats, playing classical piano, volunteering with animal rescue, and indoor and outdoor activities ranging from jigsaw puzzles, board games, and trivia to hiking, biking, and swimming.