Brinton attended High School at
Westtown School in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He studied at
Haverford College and graduated in 1949 with a bachelor's degree in biology. He enrolled at
Scripps Institution of Oceanography as a graduate student in 1950 and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1957. He continued on as a research biologist in the Marine Life Research Group, part of the
CalCOFI program. He soon turned his dissertation into a major publication, The Distribution of Pacific
Euphausiids. In this large monograph, he laid out the major biogeographic provinces of the Pacific (and part of the Atlantic), large-scale patterns of pelagic diversity and one of the most rational hypotheses for the mechanism of sympatric, oceanic speciation. In all of these studies the role of physical oceanography and circulation played a prominent part. His work has since been validated by others and continues, to this day, to form the basis for our attempts to understand large-scale
pelagic ecology and the role of physics of the movement of water in the regulation of pelagic ecosystems. In addition to these studies he has led in the studies of how climatic variations have led to the large variations in the California Current, and its populations and communities. He has described several new species and, in collaboration with Margaret Knight, worked out the complicated life histories of many Euphausiid species. He received a formal tribute from the international
GLOBEC program in 2009. He served as a major adviser and scientist for the State Department-sponsored Naga expeditions in the Gulf of Thailand and, later, as the curator of the
UNESCO-sponsored Indian Ocean Biological Center in Cochin, India. He taught numerous students in both venues. His Academic career continued at Scripps until his retirement in the 1991. ==Family life==