Brown studied forestry, systematic botany, and ecology at the
University of Michigan in 1902, receiving his master's degree in 1903. Early in his career, Brown studied plant distribution on the flood plain of the
Huron River in
Ypsilanti, Michigan. He worked for the
United States Forest Service before joining
Ohio State University as professor of botany. Brown pursued further research on Hawaiian trees at
Yale University for two years and received his Ph.D. in 1918. He married biologist
Elizabeth Dorothy Wuist on August 20 of the same year, and the two of them performed two years of field work on the
Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bayard Dominick Expedition to the
Marquesas Islands (1921–1922), along with ethnologist Edward S. Handy and archeologist Ralph Lauton. Brown and his wife also visited the Tuamotu archipelago and New Zealand where they collected 9000 dried plant and 120 wood samples. In 1920, Brown was a research fellow at Yale when he became a staff botanist for the Bishop Museum in
Honolulu,
Hawaii. His wife joined him at the Bishop Museum as a research associate in cryptogamic botany. == Organizations ==