Dr. Brown has authored numerous articles in leading sociology and population health journals (CV), and his research contributions have been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association. Brown was also the recipient of Duke University's Thomas Langford Award and was a resident fellow at Oxford University (2019-2020). In addition, he has been awarded funding for his training and research from the Robert Wood Johnson and Ford Foundations as well as the National Institutes of Health.

Brown is currently working on several projects that investigate macro-level factors and psychosocial mechanisms that underlie social inequalities in health. The first project, "Structural Racism and Health Stratification in the U.S.: Connecting Theory to Measurement," is on the conceptualization and measurement of state-level structural racism and its effects on population health. The second project uses robust analytic techniques to quantify the contributions of socioeconomic adversity and stress processes to ethnoracial inequalities in health.