23 Facts About Adriana Briscoe

Adriana Darielle Mejia Briscoe is an American evolutionary biologist and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

Adriana Briscoe specializes in research questions at the intersection of sensory physiology, color vision, coloration, animal behavior, molecular evolution, and genomics.

Adriana Briscoe has discovered and systematically demonstrated over the course of her career that butterflies are a unique organism to enable such studies on account of the diversity of photoreceptor proteins, or opsins, which are expressed in the retina of a butterfly.

Adriana Briscoe is known for her studies on gene expression of phototransduction proteins, duplication events in opsin genes, the discovery of new opsins, and the discovery of pigments which present in the wing coloration patterns of butterflies.

Adriana Briscoe's studies have demonstrated the co-evolution of butterfly vision and wing color at a molecular-level as a strategy for secure inter-species communication.

Adriana Briscoe was born in Hawaii and was raised in Colton, California, where she graduated from Colton High School in 1988.

Adriana Briscoe comes from a family of Mexican American teachers and was especially inspired to pursue higher education by her family members and most especially her maternal grandmother, Consuelo Lozano, and her mother, Loretta Mejia.

Adriana Briscoe's mother was the only Spanish-named woman from San Bernardino county to graduate from the University of California, Riverside in 1965.

Adriana Briscoe's father, Peter Briscoe, was an academic librarian and is a writer of short stories and a novella.

Adriana Briscoe jumped a grade in school and found herself inspired by her new teacher who showed them fossil teeth and taught them songs to remember the name of dinosaurs.

Adriana Briscoe continued her graduate studies at Harvard University, specializing in evolutionary biology where her Ph.

In 2012, Adriana Briscoe was an overseas visiting research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge.

Adriana Briscoe has been a faculty affiliate of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action since 2012.

Adriana Briscoe is particularly well known for the discovery of new opsins, her application of functional approaches for the study of light-sensitive pigments which lead to color vision, and her study of the links between genetic expression of these proteins and functional behavior.

Adriana Briscoe's investigations have been largely situated in the field of molecular evolution.

Since her time as a graduate student at Harvard University, Adriana Briscoe has been involved with the discovery of opsins which are key in butterfly vision alongside studying the expression levels of these photoreceptors as a function of functional butterfly behavior.

Adriana Briscoe's studies have sought to elucidate the role and emergence of double gene duplication events in opsin protein expression as a function of environmental stimuli.

Adriana Briscoe's career has been distinguished by the study of diverse butterfly species and international collaborations which have supported these investigations.

Adriana Briscoe's team's continued investigations on ultra-violet opsins in the Heliconius erato butterfly have elucidated additional layers of diversification in gene expression which are linked to a butterfly's gender.

Adriana Briscoe served as council member for the American Genetic Association from 2011 to 2014.

Adriana Briscoe served as an advisory board member of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center from 2010 until 2012.

Since beginning her independent research group in 2002, Adriana Briscoe has mentored fourteen graduate students and postdocs.

Adriana Briscoe has a publication record in the areas of physiological genomics, molecular evolution, color, vision, and sensory biology.