Mary Brazier

Life and work

She was born in Weston-super-Mare, England, in 1904 and died in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1995. She was the second of two children in a Quaker family.

She attended the Sidcot School and earned a Bachelor of Science from Bedford College of the University of London.

She received a Ph.D in physiology and biochemistry from the University of London in 1930, began neuroscience research at Maudsley Hospital, London, and in 1940 came to Boston on a Rockefeller Fellowship. She remained at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for twenty years. In 1961, she moved to the Brain Research Institute at UCLA until her retirement. She was internationally known as an outstanding neuroscientist, historian, author, and editor.

Brazier made many fundamental contributions to the study of EEG changes in anesthesia and was one of the pioneers in applying computer analysis to EEG signals. She also published in history of science.

Beginning in 1948 Brazier worked on integrating Norbert Wiener's work on noise processing to the analysis of EEGs. Her work in autocorrelation and cross-correlational analyses was published in 1952, co-authored by James Casby - an undergraduate working in her laboratory. In 1953 Brazier and Wiener presented their work at the Third International EEG Congress in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the 1950s she was one of the people, together with Herbert Jasper, Henri Gastaut, Ivane Beritashvili and Denise Albe-Fessard to promote the idea of the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO) and assisted in its founding by enlisting UNESCO support. She was the sixth secretary general, and first woman in that role at IBRO, beginning in 1978 and remaining in that position until 1983.

She was editor-in-chief of Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology from 1974 to 1984.

Brazier was the author of almost 250 articles and books. Her papers are kept at the UCLA Special Collections library.