Starting in 2001, Brown switched the focus of his USF laboratory from superconductivity to the electric sense of sharks (and their relatives). These fish use electricity as a type of sixth sense to navigate their murky worlds, including hunting for prey, since living things give off small electric signatures.

Though they never actually swam with sharks, Brown's team collected gel from their electrosensitive organs and used computer modeling to imagine what “electric vision” might be like for a shark. Between 2002 and 2010, they published a number of papers.

Here are some examples of that work: