In the summer of 1975, Bob and Beverly Brown loaded their few personal belongings into a U-Haul truck and drove more than 1,200 miles northbound on I-35 – the same road the couple took for the 70-mile drive from San Antonio to Austin. With this trip, the pair moved away from their hot, dry home state of Texas to the snowy, seasonal northern Midwest.

The Browns chose to continue their educations at University of Minnesota near Minneapolis, where Robert worked to complete his doctorate in chemical engineering and his wife received her doctorate in biochemistry.

Beverly said the couple applied to universities around the country and chose the University of Minnesota because it had the best programs for both of them and they were both accepted.

Brown said he put most of his energy into his education and research work while in Minneapolis, eventually taking his first turn in front of the classroom.

“I had a strong community among the graduate students and I was active in the graduate student association department and things like that, but again I put most of my energy into work,” he said. “I was teaching undergraduate classes … and the year I did it, I was the only graduate student who was an instructor.”

Brown said even though the administration assigned him to classes he did not have an expansive knowledge about, he still enjoyed it.

“It was kind of sadistic – it was great because you learned how to learn something under the pressure that you had to teach it, which is a very different learning experience than learning something to pass a test,” he said. “To explain it to somebody else is very different.”

Brown continued his classroom work throughout his four years in Minnesota while working on his thesis, “Shape and Stability of Rotating Drops,” an admittedly “esoteric” subject and had “absolutely no practical application.”

The project was well received among his peers and the chemical engineering community, Brown said, and more than 10 other publications came out of his thesis. He said he was also recently contacted to include some of the problems from his project.

After his thesis was reviewed and accepted, Brown began to search for research and teaching positions around the country.

Brown said he received recommendations from people at Minnesota and sent out applications, including a school across the Charles River from Boston University – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Beverly and Brown came out to Boston for a job interview at MIT in February 1978, the week after a massive blizzard shut down the east coast.

They had originally planned to come in the middle of the blizzard, but all transportation stopped and they had to postpone their trip.

“He interviewed in March as I recall, right after a spring snowstorm,” chemical engineering department head Robert Armstrong said in an article released by the MIT news office June 4, 2005. “Back then the nearest hotel was the Hyatt, so we put him up there for his visit. To get to the department he had to walk down the sidewalk along Memorial Drive. Of course, with the big snowbanks and melting, the sidewalk was more like a water trough than a sidewalk. Bob said he thought this was a test to see if he could walk on water in order to get a job at MIT. The rest is history.”

Brown accepted the position despite the arctic conditions, and the young couple moved to Boston in early 1979. Beverly wanted a place where they could have a home with at least some kind of a yard, so the Browns settled in Arlington for their first home in the Boston area.

Brown’s first assignment at MIT was teaching an undergraduate course on heat and mass transfer. At the time, the university paired new professors with faculty experienced in the classroom. Brown worked with Ken Smith, who has been on the faculty in the chemical engineering department since 1961.

“I co-taught it with someone who was just a fabulous teacher,” he said. “They did that to scare me to death.”

In an interview, Smith said Brown was “fun, full of energy and full of ideas.”

“He didn’t take himself too seriously,” Smith said.

Smith and Brown remained on the faculty together as Brown became a full professor in four years and then moved on to become the head of the chemical engineering department after being at MIT for nine years.

“I taught more than the average load, both because there were things I had to teach and I just enjoyed it,” Brown said.

Smith said Brown maintained his energy and wealth of ideas, even if “he did become a little more serious” as he climbed the administrative ladder.

The pair taught that first class together and then ended up sharing an office suite together when the department was reorganized.

Brown continued to teach a full load of classes until he became the dean of the College of Engineering. He also continued his large research group, which focused on liquids and their applied physics.

Once Brown took on the dean position, he began to shrink his research group.

Brown still has three Ph.D. students that he frequently corresponds with and one post-doctorate student at MIT, all of who are working on degrees and research.

After Brown served for only two and a half years, he assumed the provost position for the entire university in 1998. Then-president Charles Vest moved Brown into the second floor of the main corridor where the two shared an office suite.

“I will simply say that he is the best academic administrator I’ve ever worked with,” Vest said in the June 4 MIT release.

Brown stayed in the provost position while MIT’s new president, Susan Hockfield, joined the university and became familiar with the structure.

“I helped her learn about the university and start shaping it in the way she wants to shape it,” Brown said. “It was really amazing. To look at a place through new eyes and to work with someone who was looking at the university as someone who learned it through new eyes was actually exhilarating.

“We had a really good time working together because she had tremendous energy and insight,” he continued. “You could see that she was shaping and molding it because she viewed it in a unique way. It was a really good experience. It’s always good to see things differently.”

At the time, Brown did not know that he would soon be going through the same transition as Hockfield.

While Brown was busy progressing through MIT and getting to know the campus, things were also busy within the Brown home.