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. 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. 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 at the University of 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
Briscoe's research career has been largely distinguished by her studies on the evolution of vision in butterflies. She 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. Her investigations have been largely situated in the field of molecular evolution.
Since her time as a graduate student at Harvard University, 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. Her studies have also sought to elucidate the role and emergence of double gene duplication events in opsin protein expression as a function of environmental stimuli. Such double duplication events have been hypothesized to play a key role in the evolution of color vision in primates, including humans. As Briscoe herself has addressed, gene duplication and mutation events in opsins more broadly account for a large fraction of genetic changes associated with human retinal diseases, including retinitis pigmentosa.