Brian V. Brown was Curator of Entomology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County from 1993-2024. A native of Toronto, Canada, Brown did his undergraduate and masters work at the University of Guelph. There, he took up the study of the fly family Phoridae. In 1990, he obtained his doctorate at the University of Alberta in Canada, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution and University of Maryland. In 1993 he took up his position in Los Angeles, from which he retired in 2024. He has done research in many parts of the world, but especially tropical rainforests, where he studies the phorids known as ant decapitating flies and bee killing flies. During his career, he has always been interested in inventories, and has so far described over 700 species new to science. Brown is also interested in fossil phorid flies in amber, integrating them into phylogenetic knowledge based on morphology and molecular characters. An important NSF-funded project was the effort to completely inventory the Diptera (true fly) fauna of the mid-elevation tropical forest in Costa Rica. A further endeavor is his exploration of the urban insect fauna of Los Angeles, called the BioSCAN project, which has uncovered surprising new knowledge about species living in local backyards. In 2021, his tropical research in the Brazilian Amazon was featured in National Geographic magazine.