Steve David Macleod Brown is director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Mammalian Genetics Unit, MRC Harwell at

Harwell Science and Innovation Campus The Harwell Science and Innovation Campus is a 700-acre science and technology campus in Oxfordshire, England. Over 6,000 people work there in over 240 public and private sector organisations, working across sectors including Space, Clean Ener ...

, Oxfordshire, a research centre on mouse genetics. In addition, he leads the Genetics and Pathobiology of Deafness research group.

Education

Brown was educated at

Belfast Royal Academy The Belfast Royal Academy (commonly shortened to ) is the oldest school in the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland. It is a co-educational, non-denominational voluntary grammar school in north Belfast. The Academy is one of 8 schools in Northern ...

and

St Catharine's College, Cambridge St Catharine's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1473 as Katharine Hall, it adopted its current name in 1860. The college is nicknamed "Catz". The college is located in the historic city-centre of Camb ...

, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1977 followed by a PhD in 1981 for research on the molecular organisation and

evolution Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...

rodent Rodents (from Latin , 'to gnaw') are mammals of the order Rodentia (), which are characterized by a single pair of continuously growing incisors in each of the upper and lower jaws. About 40% of all mammal species are rodents. They are na ...

genomes supervised by

Gabriel Dover Gabriel A. Dover (13 December 1937 – 1 April 2018) was a British geneticist, best known for coining the term molecular drive in 1982 to describe a putative third evolutionary force operating distinctly from natural selection and genetic drift. ...

Career and research

Brown conducts research in mouse

genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...

and

genomics Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, three-dim ...

. He has studied repeated sequences in the DNA of mice and produced molecular maps of mouse

chromosomes A chromosome is a long DNA molecule with part or all of the genetic material of an organism. In most chromosomes the very long thin DNA fibers are coated with packaging proteins; in eukaryotic cells the most important of these proteins are ...

, which were used to

sequence In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed and order matters. Like a set, it contains members (also called ''elements'', or ''terms''). The number of elements (possibly infinite) is calle ...

the mouse genome. He subsequently pioneered efforts to functionally annotate the mouse genome and identify and generate novel disease models through

mutagenesis Mutagenesis () is a process by which the genetic information of an organism is changed by the production of a mutation. It may occur spontaneously in nature, or as a result of exposure to mutagens. It can also be achieved experimentally using la ...

and

phenotyping In genetics, the phenotype () is the set of observable characteristics or traits of an organism. The term covers the organism's morphology or physical form and structure, its developmental processes, its biochemical and physiological proper ...

. In particular, he has identified key proteins involved in

hearing Hearing, or auditory perception, is the ability to perceive sounds In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psycholog ...

, contributing to the understanding of the genetics of

deafness Deafness has varying definitions in cultural and medical contexts. In medical contexts, the meaning of deafness is hearing loss that precludes a person from understanding spoken language, an audiological condition. In this context it is written ...

. For example, research in Brown's laboratory has shown that a

mutation In biology, a mutation is an alteration in the nucleic acid sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA. Viral genomes contain either DNA or RNA. Mutations result from errors during DNA or viral replication, mi ...

in the Evi1 gene increases susceptibility to inflammation of the middle ear (

otitis media Otitis media is a group of inflammatory diseases of the middle ear. One of the two main types is acute otitis media (AOM), an infection of rapid onset that usually presents with ear pain. In young children this may result in pulling at the ear, ...

) in mice, leading to hearing loss. A particular focus has been the use of mouse models to elucidate the molecular basis of genetic deafness. With

Karen Steel Karen Penelope Steel FRS FMedSci is a British scientist who studies the genetics of deafness, using the mouse as a model to identify the genes involved and to understand the molecular, cellular and physiological mechanisms involved. She is Profess ...

, he discovered myosin VIIA as the gene underlying the shaker-1 mutant – one of the first deafness genes to be identified. Prior to being appointed director of Harwell in 1998, Brown was a professor at

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

. He is chair of the

International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium The International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC) is an international scientific endeavour to create and characterize the phenotype of 20,000 knockout mouse strains. Launched in September 2011, the consortium consists of over 15 research insti ...

steering committee and joint editor-in-chief of the journal ''

Mammalian Genome ''Mammalian Genome'' is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes research and review articles in the fields of genetics and genomics in mouse, human and related organisms. As of July 2009 its editors-in-chief are Joseph H. Nadeau and Stephen D. M. ...

''.

Awards and honours

Brown was awarded

The Genetics Society The Genetics Society is a British learned society. It was founded by William Bateson and Edith Rebecca Saunders in 1919 and celebrated its centenary year in 2019. It is therefore one of the oldest learned societies devoted to genetics. Its membe ...

Medal in 2009, elected a Fellow of the

Academy of Medical Sciences The Academy of Medical Sciences is an organisation established in the UK in 1998. It is one of the four UK National Academies, the others being the British Academy, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society. Its mission is to adv ...

in 2001, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: His certificate of election reads:

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Brown, Stephen David Macleod Living people Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences (United Kingdom) British geneticists Alumni of St Catharine's College, Cambridge Academics of Imperial College London Medical Research Council (United Kingdom) people 1955 births