Roy W. Brown is a British-born engineer, humanist and human rights activist. He was president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) from 2003 to 2006 and was for a time its main representative at the United Nations, Geneva.
Early years
Roy Brown was born in London on 2 November 1947. He was educated at the Martin School, East Finchley and The Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, an Independent school in Elstree in Hertfordshire, and the University of London where he read Engineering. He trained as an engineer with ITT in London working on the development of electronic systems, and the UK Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Orford Ness and Aldermaston where he was part of the team developing monitoring systems for the international Test Ban Treaty. After emigrating to Canada where he worked for four years with Canadian Marconi in Montreal on the design of airborne radar and navigation systems he returned to the UK as Chief Designer for Racal Research in Tewkesbury, pioneers in the field of Computer Aided Design.
Metier Management Systems
In 1976, with three colleagues: Richard (Dick) Evans, Robin Lodge and James Miller, Brown founded Metier Management Systems in London, the first company to develop and market mini-computer-based systems for the management of large scale projects. Their first product, Apollo, launched in 1977, was the first Project Management System to run on a minicomputer but was limited to network planning and scheduling. It was joined in 1978 by a sister product, Artemis which incorporated cost and resource management, and became the world's first commercially successful relational database system.
By the early 1980s, Artemis systems were in use in over 30 countries providing management information for some of the world's largest civil, aerospace, nuclear and military projects, including the construction of off-shore oil platforms, aircraft development, the construction of five military cities in the Middle East, the maintenance of the US navy fleets at Long Beach and Norfolk Naval Yard, aerospace projects, nuclear power plant maintenance, and production scheduling in the UK and US automobile industries.
From 1978 until 1982, as the business grew, Metier developed Artemis systems for other platforms including Hewlett Packard and IBM mainframes. From 1980 Metier embarked on an ambitious programme to develop their own RISC-based computer hardware and a complete software rewrite, to be called Artemis 2.
By 1985 when the partners sold the company to the Lockheed Corporation, one of their biggest customers, Metier had 700 employees (of whom 70 were shareholders) and offices in 21 countries.
World Population Foundation
Brown moved to the Netherlands in 1984 where with his wife Diana he founded the World Population Foundation (WPF) to promote family planning: a major factor in improving the quality of life of women and families, and solving the problems of human development and rapid population growth in developing countries.
By 1993 WPF had become one of the leading population advocacy organisations in Europe, and in 1994 played an important role in the Dutch delegation to the International Conference on Population and Development, (ICPD), held in Cairo.
In 1996, WPF became a founding member of Eurongo, the European network of NGOs working in the field of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, Population and Development, an organisation first proposed in 1991 by Brown, Sjaak Bavelaar (at that time Executive Director of WPF), and Ann Allport of CARE International.
WPF played a significant role in persuading the Dutch government to treble its funding for population assistance in 1998, becoming the largest single donor to the UN Population Fund. In 1999 WPF became more widely known when it was chosen by the UN to host the Hague Forum on Population and Development.
WPF continued to grow under the direction of Executive Director Wouter Meijer and by 2004 when he retired, had projects in 16 countries and had opened offices in Pakistan and Viet Nam, employing around 60 staff worldwide.
In 1998 Brown handed over the chairmanship of WPF to Nicolaas Biegman, former Dutch ambassador to the UN, but remained on the board until 2012.
International Foundation for Population and Development
The family moved to Switzerland in 1987.