Skip to content ↓

Emery Brown earns American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Pierre Galletti Award

AIMBE's highest honor recognizes MIT professor's contributions to neural signal processing, anesthesiology advances.
Press Inquiries

Press Contact:

David Orenstein
Phone: 617-324-2079
Picower Institute
Close
Photo of Emery Brown wearing a dark suit and white shirt standing in front of the glassy front entrance of the Picower Institute
Caption:
Neuroscientist, anesthesiologist, and statistician Emery Brown earned the highest recognition of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering for advancing neuroscience data analysis and the understanding of how anesthesia affects the brain.
Credits:
Photo: David Orenstein/The Picower Institute

The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering has awarded its highest honor this year to Emery N. Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Health Sciences and Technology in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT.

Brown, who is also an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Warren M. Zapol Professor at Harvard Medical School, received the 2022 Pierre M. Galletti Award during the national organization’s Annual Event held on March 25.

For decades, Brown’s lab has uniquely unified three fields: neuroscience, statistics, and anesthesiology. He is renowned for the development of statistical methods and signal-processing algorithms to enable and improve analysis of neural activity measurements. The work has had numerous applications including studies of learning and memory, brain-computer interfaces, and systems neuroscience. He has also pioneered investigations of how general anesthetic drugs work in the brain to induce and maintain simultaneous but reversible states of unconsciousness, amnesia, immobility, and analgesia. Building on these improvements in fundamental understanding, his lab engineers systems to improve monitoring of patient state and anesthetic dosing during surgery. Optimizing doses of general anesthetic drugs can improve patient care in many ways, including by minimizing side effects such as post-operative delirium and by improving post-operative pain management.

AIMBE said Brown earned the award in recognition of his “significant contributions to neuroscience data analysis and for characterizing the neurophysiology of anesthesia-induced unconsciousness and demonstrating how it can be reliably monitored in real time using electroencephalogram recordings.”

Brown, who is also a faculty member in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, is now working to develop a research center at MIT dedicated to taking neuroscience-based approaches to advance anesthesiology.

“I am extremely honored and grateful to the AIMBE for choosing me to receive the 2022 Galletti Award in recognition of my research deciphering the neuroscience of how anesthetics work,” he says. “I would like to express my gratitude to my collaborators, post-doctoral fellows, students, research assistants, and clinical coordinators who have made this possible.”

Related Links

Related Topics

Related Articles

More MIT News

Headshot of Catherine Wolfram

A delicate dance

Professor of applied economics Catherine Wolfram balances global energy demands and the pressing need for decarbonization.

Read full story