It is a sad state of affairs when the terms “brilliance” and “genius” are tossed around as accolades for Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Tyler Perry, Nicki Minaj or Kanye West. West’s psychosis perpetuates a posture of megalomania, and Jay-Z’s wealth makes many think he is handsome and larger than life, but the truth is that these attribute are worthless in comparison to Brown.
Who is Emery Brown you might ask? Well, for starters, he is an M.D., a Ph.D., and professor of health sciences and technology and computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also currently the Warren M. Zapol professor of anesthesia at the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. In addition, he serves as the director of both the Neuroscience Statistics Research Laboratory and Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr. Brown received all of his degrees from Harvard including an A.M. and Ph.D. in statistics in 1988 and a doctorate from the medical school in 1987. His research examines using combinations of likelihood, Bayesian, state-space, time-series and point-process approaches to develop statistical methods and signal-processing algorithms for neuroscience data analysis. In addition, he studies general anesthesia and the mechanism by which an anesthetic drug induces general anesthesia. He employs several neuroscience approaches to study how the state of general anesthesia is induced and maintained. The long-term goal of his research is to establish a neurophysiological definition of anesthesia; safer, site-specific anesthetic drugs; and to develop better neurophysiologically-based methods for measuring depth of anesthesia.
It’s too bad that men of the intelligence level of Dr. Brown are not admired, sought out or placed in the main view of the public by African American media outlets. In fact, it seems that there is more interest in promoting Waka Flocka, some basketball housewife (who isn’t married) or some rapper arrested for some unseemly behavior than the true brilliance we have in our midst. Maybe, one day, this will change. But maybe not.
And we wonder why our children look up to celebrities and have no real role models. It is because we choose to acknowledge and celebrate them instead of superb leaders like Dr. Emery Brown who are actually helping people and changing the world for the better. –torrance stephens
Torrance Stephens, Ph.D., authors the blog rawdawgb.blogspot.com. Find him on twitter.com/rawdawgbuffalo.
