Research Spotlight with Craig Brown

March 23, 2026

Craig Brown is a professor in the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Victoria. His primary research interest is to understand how stroke and co-morbid conditions such as diabetes alter neural, glial and vascular networks in the brain. Since starting his laboratory in 2009, Brown’s research program has been supported by the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR), Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, and NSERC. In this Research Spotlight, he talks about how his lab’s work is informing treatment strategies for improving the recovery of brain function after injury or disease.

Tell us a little about your lab, commonly called the Brown lab.  

The central theme of the lab I would say is basically understanding the connection between circulation and brain function. One of the ways we study this connection is that we look at how the brain reacts and responds to an ischemic stroke, which is the leading cause of disability in adults in North America. 

Because we’re modelling this in mice, we can examine this question with multiple tools. In my lab a lot of experiments involve brain imaging. We image how the blood vessels change after a stroke and how they can make positive changes—and can also cause detrimental changes. The key is to understand what normally happens after a stroke. In addition to imaging, we also assess brain function through pharmacological, molecular-genetic and behavioural approaches.  

How much do we know about strokes and stroke recovery?

We still have a difficult time predicting who’s going to recover well and who’s not going to recover well from a stroke. There are a lot of hidden variables we don’t understand that play a role in if you have a good or bad outcome. Stroke often happens with other medical conditions, called comorbidities.

In our lab, we study how diabetes can complicate recovery from a stroke. If you’re diabetic and have a stroke, you’re more likely to have a poorer prognosis. We have studied this in the lab. There are several explanations for this, but ultimately diabetes disrupts the brain’s microcirculation; it’s essentially a vascular disease. To have optimal recovery from stroke you need to adjust blood flow to prevent further damage but in a manner that does not lead to deleterious complications like hemorrhage. Diabetes can interfere with blood flow changes that occur after a stroke.   

Are you working on any exciting projects right now?

I have a CIHR grant that looks at endothelial calcium waves and how that might be a fundamental mechanism for regulating blood flow in the brain. We are imaging endothelial cells, which are cells that line your blood vessels and help them contract and relax. We examine how calcium waves in these endothelial cells correlate with blood flow changes. To provide more causal links, we are stimulating or diminishing these calcium waves to see if alters blood flow in a predicable manner. By doing this, we hope to manipulate blood flow after stroke in a beneficial manner to optimize recovery.

Another CIHR grant looks at the effects of diabetes on blood flow to the brain. In a paper published in the journal Nature Metabolism a year ago we described how diabetes leads to changes in blood flow over time. We found that diabetic mice had persistently high levels of interleukin-10 (IL-10), which caused chronic inflammation. This led to small blood vessels in the brain becoming clogged with red blood cells. The reduced blood flow in the brain, in turn, leading to impaired cognitive function. We discovered that by blocking the receptor for IL-10, we could improve brain blood flow and cognitive function in diabetic animals.  

How does your work fit into the big picture of health research?

My expertise is understanding and making these first observations, the fundamental blocks that someone else has not described. Virtually all treatments that end up in humans start in animals, where the fundamental science is developed. We focus on making these initial discoveries and do careful, rigorous science. We publish our findings and let the world know about it. In addition to our findings, we anticipate that other labs will replicate the work, which would further strengthen the case for clinical trials.

The common thing I’ve been interested in throughout my career, even as a graduate student, is to understand brain plasticity, how the brain changes in life and reacts to things that happen in life, such as disease. I get to study plasticity, but it may also help people at some point. Ultimately, I chose this career because I enjoy doing research—that in and of itself is satisfying.

Can you talk about the role students play in your research?

I have several undergraduate, master’s, PhD students, and a couple of research associates. Sometimes I have postdoctoral fellows. My job is to train students to think like a scientist and get them to a point where they can do an experiment properly and do it really well.

Doing research teaches students how to think creatively, be independent, and how to solve problems. It really requires people to take initiative and figure things out for themselves—there’s no cookbook for you to follow to generate a new finding that no one else has found. I think that a lot of these skills are very useful to whatever career students choose. Not everyone is going to be a professor or go into academia. The writing skills, creative thinking and problem-solving skills students develop are universal skills needed for highly sought after jobs. I’m proud of the people I’ve trained.