Wes Brown never seemed to sit still. “If we were ever watching television, she was doing at least two other things at the same time,” says her husband, Andrew Hoffman, MD ’76, a professor of medicine at Stanford. She might be crocheting a baby blanket for her son’s teacher or cold-emailing archaeologists about an arrowhead she had found at a flea market.
Photo: Courtesy Hoffman-Brown Family
Brown brought that same boundless energy and curiosity to her work. An infectious disease specialist, she helped establish Stanford’s blood and marrow transplantation and cellular therapy (BMT-CT) program, developed cutting-edge therapies in her lab, and taught her colleagues how to enlist the latest treatments in their care of immunocompromised patients.
Janice “Wes” Yu Brown, ’81, a professor of medicine and a co-founder of Stanford Medicine’s Immunocompromised Host Infectious Diseases Clinic, died of endometrial cancer on April 14. She was 63.
Brown, who grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., was a 16-year-old award-winning concert pianist when she arrived at Stanford. She majored in biological sciences, attended medical school at the University of Virginia, and then returned to Stanford for a residency in internal medicine. Shortly thereafter, she zeroed in on infectious disease.
Irving Weissman, MD ’65, a professor of pathology and of developmental biology, recruited Brown to his lab because of her sharp diagnostic skills and deep understanding of the biological mechanisms of disease and disease therapies. When she oversaw phase 2 clinical trials for a novel therapy for cytomegalovirus, which can cause life-threatening infections in people with weakened immune systems, “her science pointed the way to how it could work,” Weissman says.
Brown was the first person many of her colleagues in the BMT-CT division would call whenever one of their patients faced a dire infection. “She was smart enough and brave enough to break with tradition and devise strategies, like with higher doses of agents or combinations of agents,” says professor of medicine Judith Shizuru, PhD ’86, MD ’92. “If I was in a situation where I was worried about somebody, I could call her in the middle of the night and she would just engage—she would give me her very best and learned opinion about what to do.”
At the heart of Brown’s modus operandi was a genuine interest in people, and she had a knack for learning someone’s life story in a 10-minute conversation. “She gave everybody her phone number,” Hoffman says. “Patients would call all the time.”
In a eulogy to his mother, Jacob Hoffman, ’17, MS ’18, put it simply: “Curiosity is a love language, and it certainly was hers.”
In addition to her husband and Jacob, Brown is survived by daughter Samantha Hoffman, ’17, and son Zachary Hoffman, ’23, MS ’24.
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
