Carolyn J. Brown

Willard has referred to Brown as "the critical individual who transformed the study of X inactivation". Brown became Research Associate in 1990 in the Stanford Department of Genetics, and two years later moved with Willard’s laboratory to the Department of Genetics of Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, where she continued studying the XIST long noncoding RNA. Brown became Assistant Professor (1994) and Associate Professor (1999) in the Department of Medical Genetics of the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, and was promoted to Professor in 2004. She was the Head of the Department from 2011 to 2014. She has supervised over twenty postdoctoral fellows and graduate students in her laboratory.

Brown received her Bachelor of Science in Genetics in 1983 from the University of Guelph, Ontario. She started her PhD thesis work at the University of Toronto in 1983, under the supervision of Hunt Willard, and concluded it at Stanford University, following the moving of Willard’s laboratory in 1989. Brown initiated the studies of the X chromosome in the lab, and her PhD thesis was entitled “Studies of Human X-Chromosome Inactivation”. Her work involved the analysis of genes that “escape” X-chromosome inactivation, being expressed from the (otherwise) inactive X chromosome, as well as the molecular characterization of the X-inactivation center, the genetic locus necessary for silencing of the chromosome. These two topics converged in the 1990 discovery of the XIST gene, which localizes to the X-inactivation center and is expressed solely from the inactive X chromosome. This discovery was reported in two papers in Nature in 1991.

Carolyn J. Brown (born in 1961, Ontario) is a Canadian geneticist and Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia. Brown is known for her studies on X-chromosome inactivation, having discovered the human XIST gene in 1990.