Professor Emery Brown is one of twelve scientists nationwide to receive the National Institutes of Health Pioneer Awards. The Massachusetts General Hospital professor of anesthesia and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of computational neuroscience and health sciences and technology, received the 2007 Pioneer Award for exceptionally innovative research.

The Pioneer Award, inaugurated in 2004, aims to stimulate high-impact medical research, by providing up to $500,000 per year for five years to a highly select group of individuals whose work may add to the body of mental health knowledge and have the potential to make extraordinary contributions to medical research.

Dr. Brown will develop a systems neuroscience approach to study how anesthetic drugs act in the brain to create the state of general anesthesia.