“Edward Carpenter’s woody plant identification course was fun and useful. The fact that UConn received the 2024 arboretum accreditation probably was a result of his efforts in the past to diversify our landscape. Sidney Waxman’s research on witches’ broom was fascinating.” And she really started seeing how all the pieces of research fit together while working on an honors project on the flowering plant vinca (catharanthus) with Parker, who was her faculty advisor. The lesson stuck.

“I am very obsessive about making sure I understand the literature on a topic, and the graduate students tease me that I’m the Yoda of the internet because I’m always searching for things by using different terms and finding different combinations,” she says. Hoping to continue her ornamental horticulture studies, Brown went to Rutgers University in New Jersey for graduate school, but the only openings for funding were asparagus breeding or fruit breeding. Fruit breeding it was. She followed that field experience with genetics experience doing peach breeding at the University of California, Davis, where Brown learned she liked the professorial side of research, too. “I was also a teaching assistant, and I loved it.” She started at Cornell in cherry breeding, co-inventing 11 cherry varieties: 10 sweet and one tart. In 1990, she was transferred to apple breeding, “and the fun accelerated,” she says.

That “accelerated” fun has seen Brown invent eight apple varieties, including the celebrated SnapDragon (from Crunch Time Apple Growers). She loves developing something with real-world outcomes, which “consumers are eating and enjoying,” she says. “Having SnapDragon named the official apple of the Buffalo Bills and the Innovative Produce item in Poland was icing on the cake. My ancestors are smiling.”