Norman J. Brown received a BA from the St. Joseph’s Seminary in Menlo Park, CA, and a BS and ME from the University of California at Berkeley. His spent his career with Lawrence Liverpool National Laboratory as an engineer in the Mechanical Engineering Department, where he worked on nuclear reactors and in optics and optical fabrication, including work on the Hubbell Telescope. Brown retired from LLNL in 1994.

An OSA member since 1981, Brown was elected a Fellow in 1982. He was a recipient of OSA’s David Richardson Medal and of SPIE’s Rudolf Kingslake Medal.