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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adriana Briscoe | 1/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriana_Briscoe | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T17:45:23.688987+00:00 | kb-cron |
Adriana Darielle Mejía 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. She specializes in research questions at the intersection of sensory physiology, color vision, coloration, animal behavior, molecular evolution, and genomics. Briscoe's work is largely focused on questions surrounding vision in butterflies with a specific focus on establishing links between genetic expression patterns leading to coloration and vision with the physiological and behavioral traits of butterflies. 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. She is also 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. Her studies have also demonstrated the co-evolution of butterfly vision and wing color at a molecular-level as a strategy for secure inter-species communication. For her research contributions, Briscoe has been recognized as an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Entomological Society. Briscoe has also been recognized as a Distinguished Scientist of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). In 2021, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
== Early life and education == Briscoe was born in Hawaii and was raised in Colton, California, where she graduated from Colton High School in 1988. 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 Mejía. In 1937, Briscoe's maternal grandmother was the only Spanish-named woman attending Colton High in San Bernardino County to graduate. Briscoe's mother was the only Spanish-named woman from San Bernardino county to graduate from the University of California, Riverside in 1965. Her father, Peter Briscoe, was an academic librarian and is a writer of short stories and a novella. She 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. After graduating high school, Briscoe went on to study at Stanford University, where she received a B.A. in philosophy, a B.S. in biological sciences and a M.A. in philosophy. As an undergraduate, she conducted field work at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory with Professor Ward Watt. She continued her graduate studies at Harvard University, specializing in evolutionary biology where her Ph.D. advisers were Naomi Pierce and Richard Lewontin. After receiving her Ph.D. she was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Arizona and at the University of Colorado, Denver, where she was supported with a fellowship from the Ford Foundation. In 2012, Briscoe was an overseas visiting research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge. She has been a faculty affiliate of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action since 2012. In the area of policy and higher education, Briscoe has been vocal on her support of government action to get more Latino individuals to teach science.
== Research, career, and service ==