Back when Jeremy Brown was a teenager growing up in South Carolina, life was “all about souping up” his Honda and watching the “Fast & Furious” movie franchise.
“I loved cars, and thought I could just make a career out of them, maybe as an automotive engineer,” said Brown, a John C. Malone Assistant Professor of mechanical engineering and a member of the Whiting School of Engineering’s Malone Center for Engineering and Healthcare. “I also spent many weekends and summers working with my father, a carpenter by trade, so engineering’s hands-on aspect came naturally to me.”
Shortly after he arrived as an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan College of Engineering, however, that dream came to a screeching halt when he learned that many automotive engineers spend most of their time working on a single subsystem, iterating it from model to model, and rarely, if ever, working directly with everyday consumers.
“That’s all cool, but I’m a big picture kind of guy. What I was looking for, what excited me about engineering, was the chance to work on large complex problems whose solutions could have a tremendous impact on an individual’s quality of life,” he remembers.
A professor pointed him to the biomedical field and he hasn’t looked back since. Today, Brown focuses on improving the way humans and machines (robots) work together, especially in the medical field. His research, which sits at the intersection of robotics, psychophysics, and medicine, emphasizes the development of haptic (touch-based) feedback for applications from minimally invasive surgical robots to upper limb prostheses. He brings together methods from human perception, neuromechanics, and biomechatronics in this work in novel ways.
“The overarching idea behind what I do is to help human beings interact with machines to accomplish a task better, be it a surgical robot performing surgery, or a prosthetic arm and hand grabbing a cup of coffee or a child’s hand,” he explains.
Brown came to Johns Hopkins from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for Academic Diversity in the Haptics Research Group in the university’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception laboratory. There, under the mentorship of Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, Brown led two research teams investigating novel haptic feedback methodologies and advanced training platforms for robotic minimally invasive surgery.
He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, and completed his bachelor’s in applied physics and mechanical engineering as part of Atlanta University Center’s Dual Degree Engineering program, between Morehouse College and the University of Michigan.
Brown’s awards and honors include a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a best student paper award at the 2012 IEEE Haptics Symposium, and the Penn Postdoctoral Fellowship for Academic Diversity.