Biographical Summary: Robert L. Brown

Robert Brown has been a lead software development manager, architect, and principal contributor for twenty years in the Silicon Valley area. He is currently Vice President at Model N, Inc., and manages the product development organization.  Previous to Model N, he was the Vice President of Engineering at Blue Martini Software.  During his nine years at Silicon Graphics, he designed and lead the creation of IRIS Explorer, a visualization system with a graphical programming language. He managed the team that released four versions of Explorer over three years. He was also the lead designer and manager of the FireWalker authoring system in Silicon Studio, a subsidiary of SGI. More recently, he managed groups inside another SGI subsidiary, Alias Wavefront, and released add-on products for Power Animator to help take that system into the games and interactive markets. Finally, he lead the teams for polygon tools and libraries for the AW Maya product. Before SGI, Robert was a founder of the Research Institute of Advanced Computer Science (RIACS), helping to bring Ph.D.-level computer research to NASA Ames Research Center. While at RIACS, he was Principal Investigator on several funded projects, and worked in workstation technology, parallel computing, distributed systems, telescience, and virtual reality. Robert holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a doctorate in computer science from Purdue University, and has published numerous reports and articles, including in IEEE Computer and Scientific American.