 He founded Brownlee Labs in the 70s, in the San Francisco Bay area, a manufacturer of columns and pumps for high-performance liquid chromatography systems.Bob Brownlee took the initiative "along with Tom Jupille, Steve Bakalyar, Nelson Cooke, Jerry Higgins and Ron Majors" to form the Bay Area Chromatography Colloquium.Bob Stevenson is quoted as saying in his "Nine Lives of the California Separation Science Society" that Brownlee Labs was "certainly one of the globe's leaders in HPLC column technology."