Photo credit: Jay Parson, Studio J Photography
As an industrial researcher with a PhD in physics, Dan Brown’s father Steve provided his family of four with a secure, middle-class lifestyle. When Dan was very young, his dad was working to improve the noise-absorption of Armstrong flooring at the plant in Lancaster, Pa. In 1986, Steve moved the family to Grand Rapids, Mich., where he assumed another long-term stint at Steelcase. Dan was 12 at the time.
Showing signs of brilliance at an early age, Dan had started grade 1 at the age of 5. For him, the downside of acceleration was most keenly felt at 14 in grade 10. At the time, he stood only 4'10" tall — shutting him out of high school athletics. Instead, he joined theatre programs in school and in the community, and he frequently entered “nerdy math competitions.”
It was a first-place showing in a statewide math contest that helped him land a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass., where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics with computer science in 1995. While at MIT, Dan also studied linguistics and music, and he sang in the Concert Choir. “I used the fact that I was at this amazing institution. I took liberal arts courses, everything and anything I could.”
These were heady days to be at MIT in computer science (CS). The World Wide Web was just coming into being. “MIT was one of the first 10 places in the world where people built their own web pages.” There, students engaged in instant messaging and invented online dating — complete with questionnaires — long before their ubiquity today. Opportunities to gain fabulous wealth seemed well within reach with a bachelor’s degree, and few of Dan’s MIT classmates chose to stay in school to forge a career in academia. “My classmates invented Rock Band.”
But Dan was driven to learn, experience and discover new truths. Post-graduation from MIT, he attended Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y., for his master’s and PhD in CS, and he graduated in 2000. Cornell provided even more opportunity to indulge his interests in the arts and humanities. Dan spent hours in the rare book room, singing, and attending concerts and theatre performances. And he met his partner Daniel Allen there.
Not surprising, his research at Cornell was interdisciplinary. He connected with biologists in solving optimization challenges in plant breeding. The problem was to determine which population subset offered the most even distribution and consistent cross over of the parent chromosomes. This was a question of optimization that Dan would define in algorithmic terms. The validity of his approach was proved with subsequent genetic sequencing and it remains a standard analytic protocol.
Dan had begun to analyze genome sequences before he left Cornell. Following graduation, he took advantage of a postdoc opportunity to work on the Human Genome Project at MIT. From 2000 – 2001, he joined the genome analysis group and contributed two paragraphs to the historic 62-page paper in Nature, published in February 2001. Dan is proud to have joined 1,000 other authors in the identification of the sequence of base pairs that make up human DNA. “It's an amazing moment in history and through that work, I got to meet some of the greatest scientists of the time.” The remainder of the year was dedicated to sequencing mouse DNA to provide the foundation for a new era of genetic research.
Canada’s greater acceptance of diversity played a role in Dan and Daniel’s decision to immigrate in August of 2001. They would remain true to who they were, and sought to live in a place where they could sit unnoticed in the window of a restaurant.
America’s loss was Canada’s gain. At the University of Waterloo, Dan began his research in bioinformatics and published 30 papers before receiving tenure in 2007. Focused on DNA sequences for kinship discovery, his work extended beyond applying optimization to biology. Simulation results and population studies readily conformed to optimization programs. He was interested to discover why optimization worked in these cases, on a theoretical level. “This had nothing to do with medicine or healthcare, but the raw mathematical analysis of sequence.”
It is the kind of pure research that raises eyebrows among pragmatists, especially when Dan moved to apply it to other, non-biological sequential material, like music, language and dance. But like most pure research, it has a way of finding translation for a general audience.
Dan and graduate student Hussein Hirjee turned their attention to rap music. “Rap music lyrics have highly-complicated, long, internal, imperfect rhymes.” The software they developed was able to identify the artist more often than not, meaning this line of research may have far-reaching implications for high-profile copyright and authorship dispute resolution. For Dan, he has finally brought together his passions for the arts and computer science and he continues to apply biotechnology to music.
Over the course of the last 11 years, Dan has also served in an administrative role at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, as director of first-year studies (2006 – 2009); associate director of the School (2011 – 2013); and director of undergraduate studies (2013 – 2014, 2016 – present). “I enjoy curriculum design.” Dan’s forte is the administrative legwork it takes to make exciting new courses like those in ethics, law and professionalism, a fourth-year capstone course, and, naturally, collaborative studios with fine arts, a reality. Breaking off the interview to attend an employee’s baby shower, Dan also holds responsibility for staff administration. “That has turned out to be a real joy.”
In the exercise of his managerial duties and volunteer work on dozens of committees over the years, Dan reveals his clear tendency to put service before self. He is highly cognizant and entirely grateful for an academic career that would not have been possible without the generosity of scholarship donors who underwrote half of his expenses at MIT. “I’m a middle class kid from the suburbs, still to this day passionate about educational opportunity. It would have been completely inaccessible without that support.”
