Dr Brown’s past research challenged long-standing dogma that oxygen radicals unequivocally drive tissue damage and inflammation and, in doing so, shed light on a complex interplay between mitochondrial respiration and NADPH-oxidase activity for maintaining cellular homeostasis. 

More recently, the Brown lab described a novel, degranulation-independent mechanism of priming that contributes to a growing body of evidence of (previously underrecognized) heterogeneity among neutrophils. The lab is developing methods to identify and characterize distinct neutrophil subsets as a first step to studying their role(s) in rheumatic diseases.