Ellen Brown was born in San Francisco, CA, April 30, 1912, the daughter of Warner Brown, PhD, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, and Jessie Milliken Brown, a high school teacher and botanist. She attended Emerson Elementary School in Berkeley, and University High School in Oakland. In 1934 she received her undergraduate degree, B.A., came from the University of California, Berkeley; her M.D. from the School of Medicine in 1939.

Dr. Brown served her internship at the San Francisco Hospital, 1938-39, and was Asst. then Chief Resident at the University of California Hospital, 1939-43. During this period she was also Asst. physician at the Cowell Memorial Hospital, 1940-42. Her academic appointment at UCSF began with clinical instructor, 1943-44, and from instructor to Assoc. professor, 1946-59, becoming professor of medicine in 1959. She held this post until her retirement in 1977. She was a founding member and senior staff member of the Cardiovascular Research Institute. Dr. Brown was instrumental in the revision of the Medical School curriculum in the 60s and 70s, and for the design and implementation of the very successful Introduction to Clinical Medicine courses, introduced at that time.

In 1944-46 Dr. Brown was a Commonwealth Fund fellow in the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School. Some ten years later, in 1958, she was a Guggenheim Fellow at Oxford University. Her research interests included capillary pressure and permeability, blood volume and vascular capacity; cardiac failure; cardiac complications of pregnancy, and peripheral circulation in relation to pain syndromes and vascular diseases. She has written or co-authored a number of papers in these fields.

As an academic physician and research physiologist, Dr. Brown was a member of many professional societies. Among them are the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Federation of Clinical Research, the American Physiological Society (APS), the New York Academy of Science, and the American Heart Association. She was a founding member of the Western Society for Clinical Research and of the Circulation Group of APS.