Dr. Charles Brown
PrimeExam began around the year 2000 with an idea from Dr. Charles Brown, a professor of life sciences at Santa Rosa Junior College. After decades of authoring, organizing, and administering examinations, Dr. Brown had become frustrated with the limitations of conventional word processors for creating tests. He envisioned a program that would make it easy for instructors to build and organize question banks, generate exams from those questions, and format test material without wrestling with a general-purpose word processor. Working with two others who had software-development experience, he helped turn that idea into PrimeExam. The first version was released in the early 2000s.
Dr. Brown had spent most of his professional life in science and education. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s, where his research mentor was Robert C. Stebbins, the renowned herpetologist, author, scientific illustrator, professor of zoology, and first curator of herpetology at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Dr. Brown began teaching life sciences at Santa Rosa Junior College in 1970. Although he officially retired in 2000, retirement did not end his involvement in education. He continued teaching part time, ultimately spending more than four decades in the classroom. PrimeExam grew directly out of that experience: it was designed by someone who understood the practical work of teaching because he had spent much of his life doing it.
Above all, Dr. Brown was a scientist and naturalist. His fascination with animals began in childhood and remained with him throughout his life. A particular scientific interest was the salamander Ensatina, whose genetic variation he studied for many years. He was well known among family and friends for spending long hours in the hills and forests of California “rolling logs”—carefully looking beneath them for salamanders, especially Ensatina. Those excursions reflected both his scientific curiosity and the respect he had for the natural world.
Dr. Brown was also an avid nature photographer. Even into his eighties, he continued carrying camera equipment on walks through state and national parks, photographing mountains, forests, fields, flowers, insects, reptiles, and, naturally, salamanders. His interests also took him far beyond California. He made several trips to Zimbabwe, returning with countless photographs of the country’s remarkable wildlife. Those who accompanied him in the field were often struck by the combination of curiosity, patience, respect, and genuine awe with which he approached the living world.
His influence extended beyond the classroom and laboratory. The original PrimeExam was one expression of his desire to make the work of teaching more practical and effective. Years later, the name Ensatina Software was chosen in recognition of the salamander that had fascinated him for so much of his life—and as a connection between the scientific curiosity that defined his career and the software project that grew from his years as an educator.
