Dennis Brown

Dennis Brown, PhD, FAPS
Chief Science Officer

Dennis Brown, PhD, joined the APS staff in July 2019 as the Society’s first-ever chief science officer (CSO). In this role, he will serve as the Society’s primary scientific spokesperson and advocate, overseeing the science policy, scientific meetings and education and member communities departments.

Brown currently serves as professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Program in Membrane Biology. He is also the associate director of the MGH Center for Systems Biology and director of the MGH Office for Research Career Development (ORCD). Brown has held key leadership positions at APS, including serving as the Society’s 90th president. He will split his time between APS headquarters in Rockville, Md., and Boston, where he will retain his affiliation with both Harvard and MGH.

A cell biologist/physiologist, Brown specializes in the use of state-of-the-art imaging techniques to follow and dissect physiologically relevant membrane protein trafficking events in epithelial and non-epithelial cells. He is an internationally recognized authority on vesicle trafficking and polarity in epithelial cells, with special focus on water channels (aquaporins) in principal cells and vacuolar proton pumping ATPase function in intercalated cells of the kidney collecting duct. His work is aimed at understanding basic cell physiology and signaling pathways in order to develop novel therapeutic strategies for kidney disease. In particular, Brown has made significant contributions toward our understanding of the cell biology of vasopressin (antidiuretic hormone) action and aquaporin 2 trafficking that inform the development of strategies to bypass defective vasopressin signaling in nephrogenic diabetes insipidus. 

Extremely active in the scientific publishing domain, Brown started as an editorial board member for the American Journal of Physiology—Renal Physiology from 1987 to 1989 and as an associate editor for the journal from 1995 to 1997. He served on the editorial board of the American Journal of Physiology—Cell Physiology from 1990 to 1995, as an associate editor from 1996 to 2002 and as editor-in-chief from 2002 to 2008. He also served as editor-in-chief of Physiological Reviews (2009–2017). Brown has previously served on the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (2003–2009), the Journal of Membrane Biology (2004–2009), the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (1990–1995) and the Journal of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry (1991–1995). He was the U.S. editor for the Springer Verlag monograph series “Anatomy, Embryology and Cell Biology” from 1996 to 1999 and was on the editorial board of Histochemistry and Cell Biology from 1991 to 2003.

As director of MGH’s ORCD, Brown has a long track record of developing young scientists, both basic researchers and clinical investigators. Many of these are in leadership positions in universities in the U.S. and throughout the world. He was awarded the prestigious A. Clifford Barger “Excellence in Mentoring” award from Harvard University in 2005 and received the HMS Dean’s Award for the Advancement of Women in Science in 2012. Brown has received numerous additional awards from MGH, APS and other scientific research organizations and has held a number of appointments at the National Institutes of Health.