A physician and neuroscientist who studies how anesthesia affects the brain; a leader in aerospace engineering, policy, and education; and the founding head of MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering have been awarded MIT’s highest faculty honor: the title of Institute Professor. With the appointments of Emery Brown, Daniel Hastings SM ’78, PhD ’80, and Douglas Lauffenburger, there are now 12 Institute Professors at MIT, along with 10 Institute Professors Emeriti. The appointments, which took effect July 1, were announced today in an email to the faculty from Sally Kornbluth, MIT’s president; Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT provost; and Roger Levy, chair of the faculty and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences. Brown, who has been a member of the MIT faculty since 2005, says he is “tremendously honored” to be appointed as an Institute Professor. “It’s a pleasure to…

Among his other awards, he is also a recipient of a National Institute of Health Director’s Pioneer Award, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, and the Swartz Prize for Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience. He one of a small group of researchers to be an elected member of all three National Academies of Medicine, Sciences, and Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Inventors. From 2012 to 2022, he served as co-director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. He has also played an instrumental role in several important efforts at MIT, including the 2010 Report on the Initiative for Faculty Race and Diversity, and the founding of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) in 2015. Outside of his work at MIT, Brown served on President Obama’s Brain Initiative W…