Christopher “Casey” Brown, an associate professor of genetics in the Perelman School of Medicine, died on March 18 from complications of liver disease. He was 44.

Dr. Brown was raised in Omaha, Nebraska and did his undergraduate studies at the University of Nebraska, followed by a PhD in genetics at Stanford University and a postdoctoral research fellowship in human genetics at the University of Chicago. After graduating from Chicago, Dr. Brown was recruited to Penn in 2013, becoming an associate professor of medicine in the division of genetics. He shortly became enmeshed in life in Philadelphia and the Penn community. “Over the course of his decade at Penn, Dr. Brown trained a remarkable cadre of postdoctoral fellows, who have minted their own careers as independent investigators and teachers in academic centers across the world,” said the department of genetics in a tribute to Dr. Brown. “He also mentored a set of highly talented graduate students who were stimulated to take on challenging and provocative theses under his guidance. His leadership role in the genomics and computational biology graduate group at Penn served to attract, retain, and stimulate many of our finest graduate students. He was a gifted, deeply informed, and highly charismatic teacher who was beloved by students and trainees.”

Dr. Brown was an incisive scientist whose work centered on approaches to understanding how human genetic variation controls gene expression. He developed and integrated cutting-edge informatic approaches and benchtop experimental designs to identify and characterize DNA sequence polymorphisms, epigenetic elements, and regions of accessible chromatin that determined variability in transcription expression and underlay consequent phenotypic alterations. While he intitially focused on expression in the liver, these studies quickly expanded to a wide array of cell types and tissues. His expertise, open-mindedness, and collegial approach fostered multiple productive research collaborations, leading to several peer-reviewed publications and substantial NIH funding. Dr. Brown was a pivotal member of the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Consortium, a nationwide multicenter effort that explored the basis for gene regulatory pathways in a wide array of tissue by integrative modeling of eQTLs and cis-regulatory elements and the dissection of complex trait mechanisms.

In his free time, Dr. Brown loved music, cooking, vegetable gardening, Manchester City football, and craft beer.

Dr. Brown is survived by his daughters, Corinne and Lilah Brown; their mother, Katherine Brown; his father, David Brown; stepmother Leigh Officer; his sisters, Claire Inbody (Curt) and Colleen Cooley (Tim); his niece, Delaney Cooley; and nephews, Elliott Inbody and Brooks Cooley. A celebration of Dr. Brown’s life was held on March 25 in Omaha, Nebraska.