The Brown laboratory seeks to understand how the diversity of neocortical neurons and the organization of their neural circuits contribute to sensory perception. After graduating with an A.B. in International Affairs and Public Policy from Princeton University, she received an M.D.-Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and at Stanford with Wade Regehr and Shaul Hestrin. Her graduate work with Richard Masland determined how receptive field properties of retinal ganglion cells are shaped by the anatomical and synaptic organization of retinal circuits. In the Regehr Lab, she demonstrated that endocannabinoids under physiological conditions can function in a synapse-specific manner. In the Hestrin Lab, she showed that synaptic connections among cortical pyramidal neurons reflect their long-range axonal projection patterns, linking the functional identity of pyramidal neurons with the patterns of their synaptic connections within the cortex. Since establishing her own laboratory at Johns Hopkins, she has continued to focus on the functional organization of the neocortex and its contributions to perception. She is currently a member of the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute at Johns Hopkins.