Rate My Professor Chris Brown

Associate Professor Chris Brown is a faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry within the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Otago. He obtained his MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Otago. Following his doctoral training, he served as a Long Term Fellow at Iowa State University from October 1994 to August 1996, funded by a Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the Human Frontier Science Program Organization. He joined the University of Otago in February 1997 and has progressed to his current role as Associate Professor. Brown teaches in the Biochemistry, Genetics Otago, Medical, and Plant Biotechnology programs.

His research centers on regulatory genomics, encompassing the identification of novel regulatory elements and genes through bioinformatics and experimental methods. Key areas include databases and tools for genomics analysis, such as TransTerm (developed over 20 years ago for translation data), HBVRegDB for hepatitis B virus regulatory elements, and CRISPR-related tools including CRISPRTarget and CRISPRSuite. Ongoing projects apply comparative genomics to discover coding and non-coding RNAs and regulatory elements in diverse systems, such as plant pathogen and endophyte interactions, methanogen genomes, pathogenic bacterial and viral genomes, and viromes. Brown's publications reflect his contributions, including "Decoding the interconnected splicing patterns of hepatitis B virus and host using large language and deep learning models" (Lim and Brown, Microbial Genomics, 2026), "RIBOSS detects novel translational events by combining long- and short-read transcriptome and translatome profiling" (Lim et al., Briefings in Bioinformatics, 2025), "Phage anti-CRISPR control by an RNA- and DNA-binding helix–turn–helix protein" (2024), "Diversification of the Rho transcription termination factor in bacteria" (2024), and "Distinct families of cis-acting RNA replication elements epsilon from hepatitis B viruses" (Chen and Brown, RNA Biology, 2012). His work has accumulated over 5,700 citations according to Google Scholar.