Dr. Patrick Brown is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He began his career in the field of chemistry, graduating with his B.A. (honors) from the University of Chicago in 1976. He then moved to the Department of Biochemistry, where he was awarded his Ph.D. on studies of DNA topoisomerases, under the mentorship of Nicholas Cozzarelli, Ph.D. After completing his M.D. and pediatric residency, he moved to the University of California–San Francisco, where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Drs. J. Michael Bishop and Harold E. Varmus. In 1988, he joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry, Stanford University School of Medicine, as an assistant professor and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.