Connor Brien (Earth-5875)

Dr. Connor Brien, nicknamed Kip duo to his resemblance to the English writer Rudyard Kipling, was a xenoanthropologist of the Office of Naval Intelligence who studied the Covenant's species, particularly the jiralhanae.

Early career
A skilled linguistic and anthropologists, Connor Brien was notably for discovering a long lost tribe in a cave system under the North American tribe whose origin dated back to a carismatic cult in the 1970s. His work took the attention of the Office of Naval Intelligence, which hired him shortly after the Shanxi Campaign. He played a key role in unraveling the methodology of the Covenant by decoding the sign language of a captive huragok prisoner.

Of all species in the Covenant, the jiralhanae were the ones that most interested him. His curiosity started by an incident where he and a squad of UNSC Marines had subdued six jiralhanae soldiers, but the tranquilizers administed of them wore off faster than expected. As a response, the Marines killed their leader, leading to a blind, primal rage within the pack, who in turn killed all of the Marines in revenge. Brien was able to cover and hide during the incident, witnessing the Brutes murdering his colleagues. While traumatized by the carnage, he became fascinated by their ferocity and social structure, and thus devoted most of his time into studying the species.