Since 1998, Professor Brown has been serving as a visiting professor at CEIBS, teaching in both EMBA and Executive Education programmes, specifically courses in operations management and project management. Prior to her move to Thunderbird, Professor Brown taught at the University of Washington for six years and Seattle University for sixteen years, serving as a faculty member, department chair, and associate dean. She has also taught in the MBA programme at IESE in Barcelona, Spain, and has led several international benchmarking study tours to Latin America. She has been recognised on several occasions for excellence in teaching, and her courses on project management were awarded the First Prize in the prestigious Instructional Innovation Competition hosted by Decision Sciences Institute.

Professor Brown is Associate Editor of the Journal of Operations Management and a member of the editorial review board of the Academy of Management Journal. Her research findings on sociotechnical systems can be found in a number of academic and practitioner-oriented publications, including the Journal of Operations Management, California Management Review, Project Management Journal, Interfaces, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, International Journal of Production Research, and Human Relations. She is currently co-authoring a book entitled Project Management: A Team-Based Approach which will be published by McGraw-Hill in 2008.

Professor Brown has served as a consultant and seminar lecturer for a wide range of private and public sector organisations, including Boeing, PACCSR, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Mosaix, POSCO Steel, St. Gobain, Metro Environmental Laboratories, public libraries, municipal governments, and Executive Programmes of the University of Washington. She also has rich experience in working with companies in China, designing and delivering Company-Specific Programmes for companies such as Philips and Sony.