Sharing the physics of life

After 55 years on Case Quad, Robert Brown still sees new worlds to explore with his students and colleagues

Story by Zachary Lewis

Robert Brown met up with his former student, Hiroyuki Fujita, in Sears think[box] in November 2025 after Fujita addressed a group of students.

At Quality Electrodynamics, Hiroyuki Fujita, MS ’98, PhD ’98, tries to solve every problem that comes his way. He’s the CEO, after all, and the founder of a highly successful Cleveland company that develops advanced medical imaging technology.

Still, there are times when the answers elude him. On those occasions, he might reach for the industry-leading textbook, what people in his field call the “Green Bible.” It was written by Robert Brown, his physics professor at Case Western Reserve University, with former students as co-authors.

If Fujita cannot find the answer in the bible, he knows he can do the next best thing — and contact Brown directly. As a former student, he enjoys lifelong access to one of the leading innovators in medical imaging.

“He’s one of the most caring and most supportive professors in the community, in the entire nation,” Fujita said. “It has been a privilege to have him in my life.”

Plenty of other alumni feel the same way, for Brown has taught on Case Quad for 55 years — “longer than most people have been alive,” he jokes.

A tall man with a warm smile and a courtly demeanor, Brown has ushered multiple generations of scientists through Case and into professional careers. Publishing and patenting with young researchers, he’s helped turn bright ideas into inventions and companies, including QED. It’s not long in any conversation that Brown brings up a former student or two, with evident pride.

“How is it that I’m still working 20 years after the usual retirement age?” he asks. “The reason is that one compelling goal after another comes up. If I see places where I can help, I like to get involved, especially if it helps the careers of my students.”

As a Distinguished University Professor and the Institute Professor in the Department of Physics, Brown’s academic home is the Rockefeller Building on Case Quad. But his reach spans the campus. University administrators credit him with showing how physicists can work with other academic disciplines and with industry to make discoveries and solve problems. His name is attached to 16 patents, the most recent one awarded in 2025. His students have attained hundreds more.

Brown not only shaped the medical imaging field, he helped save lives with an affordable malaria detection device he developed with students. Now, as a newly enshrined fellow in the National Academy of Inventors, he’s helping home in on a potential cure for cancer.

His colleague on the cancer research project, Susann Brady-Kalnay, a professor in CWRU’s Department of Molecular Biology and Microbiology, calls him “a force in the field” and an eager collaborator.

“He’s one of those unique individuals who’ve always tried to connect their research to real-world needs,” she said. “His reach has been international, over many, many decades.”

TEACHING LIFE LESSONS

Many alumni know Brown best as a teacher, one whose lessons often stick. He attained several teaching awards, including the university’s Carl F. Wittke Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and its John S. Diekhoff Award for Graduate Teaching and Mentoring.

One secret to his success is a novel teaching method. Brown developed a cyclical protocol in which he covers all major topics in a course in five brisk weeks, then repeats it twice, drilling deeper each time. He believes the approach allows students to grasp and retain more knowledge.

Beyond that, Brown developed and still leads “Life After Graduation,” a popular seminar in which students encounter the many fields open to physics majors. He does so realizing that, while some of his students will follow him into academia, most will pursue careers in business, medicine, engineering, even law.

Fujita is a proud product of the Brown pipeline. He founded and still leads an MRI-coil manufacturing company, now an affiliate of Canon Medical Systems looking to expand from 175 to 300 employees. He says he might not be in the field at all if not for Brown, who nurtured his aspirations as a student, helped him launch his business, and initially served as the company’s interim president.

“He guided me into the field of MRI,” Fujita said. “He treated all of us like we were his family. If I hadn’t met him, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today.”

Much as he has guided students like Fujita, students have guided Brown.

In his lab in the basement of the Rockefeller Building, Robert Brown works with research assistants Darcy Chew, left, a biomedical engineering and engineering physics major, and Karisa Liaw, a neuroscience and physics major.

CAPTIVATED BY IMAGING

A native of Minnesota, Brown came to CWRU with a doctorate from MIT to pursue particle physics. (That, and to attend Cleveland Orchestra concerts and cheer for the Cleveland Browns.) He describes his younger self by evoking Sheldon Cooper, the brainy character on the TV show The Big Bang Theory.

But the path he imagined – running experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) – was to veer off into an enticing new field.

When a post-doctoral student in the late 1970s approached him about MRI, specifically about the magnetic coils at the heart of the nascent technology, Brown was intrigued. Magnetic Resonance Imaging uses a magnetic field and radio waves to produce detailed anatomical images. With MRIs, he realized, “We could do things that you can’t do with X-rays. We could spot damage [in the human body] even where density does not vary.”

Brown pivoted and set to work with students writing his magnum opus with the distinctive green cover. Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Physical Principles and Sequence Design is now in its second edition. Later came a new degree pathway in the Physics Department, a specialty in MRI science. He also developed a set of MRI-training flash cards, still in wide use today.

“It changed our lives in a big way,” Brown said of MRI, including his wife, Janet, in that statement. She’s his partner in the “Life After Graduation” course and a longtime close observer of his work.

Upon being inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in December of 2025, Brown made special note of the couple’s collaboration.

“My wife and I are partners in everything,” he said. “We feel this is a wonderful life and it’s made possible with a wonderful wife.”

Robert Brown in his office with his wife, Janet, colleague Robert Deissler ’74 and student Chrissie Rollinson.

LIFESAVING INNOVATIONS

More dramatic change ensued as Brown began exploring and finding other applications of MRI science. One early discovery: the parasite which causes malaria — one of the deadliest diseases in the world — also sequesters iron, rendering the blood magnetic.

Armed with that knowledge, and working with CWRU’s Global Health program, Brown developed a portable, low-cost test for these conditions. For his work on the Magneto-Optical Detector, or MOD, Brown and his team received the prestigious “Patents for Humanity“ award in 2016 from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

An even thornier challenge, and Brown’s latest obsession, is cancer. Of all the arenas in which Brown has operated, his work on a potential immunotherapy for major forms of the disease could have the greatest impact.

While cancer cells are not magnetic, Brown and his faculty colleagues, including Brady-Kalnay, believe magnets could play a vital role in helping find and eliminate them. Specially coated magnetic beads, injected into the bloodstream, snag onto T-cells, a type of white blood cell that serves as the body’s natural defense system. Thus magnetized, those cells can then be readily identified and extracted.

Once collected, those same cells can be transformed — through the addition of a special protein called a chimeric antigen receptor — into more vigorous cancer fighters and re-injected into the body, where they resume their natural work. Even after such manipulations, T-cells “continue to have their ingrained mission,” Brown explained.

A version of this procedure using leukapheresis has existed for some time. But it’s far from a panacea. While the treatment can be lifesaving, it’s also difficult and involves very expensive instrumentation. “It’s beyond what most people’s health insurance will cover,” Janet Brown said.

The team’s method, known as CAPGLO (short for “capture and glow”), is designed to be quick, easy, and affordable, like his malaria test. It also would be widely applicable, useful against many cancers as well as lupus, solid tumors, and several neurological conditions and autoimmune diseases.

“It would be the ultimate personalized medicine,” Brady-Kalnay said.

For his part, Brown is working to improve the efficacy of collection, to routinely gather 70 to 80 percent of the T-cells in a given blood sample. When it comes to T-cells, he said, more is better, and time is of the essence.

Brady-Kalnay, meanwhile, and her colleague, David Wald, an immunologist in the CWRU School of Medicine, are moving to go public with their portion of the project. They’ve patented their work and completed the first phase of trials. Next Year they hope to publish a paper and perform trials outside the U.S.

“It’s been a good fit, with our different skill sets all coming together,” Wald said.

Robert Brown has taught physics on Case Quad for 55 years.

HE’S NOT DONE YET

Brown estimates it will be three years until his and his colleague’s methods are in active use, if all goes according to plan. “We have reasons to believe we can solve this, but we’re not there yet,” he said.

One thing that’s certainly not in the plan for Brown, 84, is stopping. He’s got too much to do.

There are T-cell collections to master, a growing number of students to train for a burgeoning field, and another field to improve: radiation therapy.

“Medical physics is a beautiful and growing career, especially as our population ages,” Brown said.

Brady-Kalnay still remembers the day she approached Brown about T-cell collection. His malaria test was relatively new to the market, and he was riding high. His reaction was vintage Bob Brown.

“He got all excited, and now, this many years later, we’re still pursuing it,” Brady-Kalnay said. “It’s not just a job for him. He gets excited about helping other people achieve their goals. He’s an icon.”

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Zachary Lewis is a former awardwinning reporter for The Plain Dealer. To comment on this story, please email casealum@casealum.org.