Draft:Laura Briscoe

Laura Briscoe
Laura Briscoe holding Sphagnum
Born	Salt Lake City, Utah
Alma mater	College of the Atlantic Northwestern University
Known for	Liverworts, Acrobolbaceae
Children	2
Scientific career
Author abbrev. (botany)	Briscoe

Laura Briscoe is an American systematist and bryologist specializing in the leafy liverwort family Acrobolbaceae. She has worked in natural history collections for over two decades and is the current Assistant Director of the Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) where she is in charge of the cryptogamic collections. Her current focus is on developing best practices for museum collections and publishing works highlighting overlooked historic figures in botany.

Early life and education

Laura Briscoe grew up in Salt Lake City and developed a passion for cryptic biodiversity at a young age. At 14, she began her career in museum collections volunteering at the Natural History Museum of Utah in the entomology collections. During high school, she completed an internship at the Naturkundemuseum in Potsdam, Germany.

She received her B.A. in 2007 from the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine in Human Ecology. While there, she worked at the George B. Dorr Natural History Museum in collections, exhibits, and public interpretation. She received her master’s in 2011 from the Plant Biology Conservation program from Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Career and research

Briscoe has contributed to floristic surveys of bryophytes in Costal Maine, the Cape Horn region of Southern Chile and Fiji. In particular, her systematic work on the liverwort subfamily Acrobolboideae has combined molecular and morphological data, and biogeographic analysis.  Historically, gametangia placement was used to delineate three genera but Briscoe’s phylogenetic analysis all the species within the monotypic genus Acrobolbus.

In Chicago, Briscoe worked in the botanical collections at The Field Museum for ten years. In 2016, she became the collections manager of the Cryptogamic Herbarium at NYBG in the Bronx. As of 2025, she oversees over two million collections including 232,000 Algae, 700,000 bryophytes, 500,000 fungi and 280,000 lichens.

More recently, Briscoe has focused on best practices for management of herbaria, particularly exsiccatae. Popular in the 19th century, exsiccatae are duplicate published sets of specimens with a common theme, either geographic region or taxonomic group. Material for these sets were often collected by a wide network of collectors, and original material used to describe new taxa were frequently distributed as soon as the names were published. Many of these nomenclatural type collections within exsiccatae have not been curated in the same ways other type collections. Briscoe has worked to improve database standards for exsiccatae collections identifying syntypes or lectotypes from sets. She has been a contributor to the MuseumPests Working Group (MPWG) (2020-present), which provides resources for integrated pest management of collections at cultural instructions.

Briscoe works to acknowledge biases in natural history collections. She has published guidelines to address the legacies of colonialism and offensive language in specimen labels in effort to incorporate harm reduction. Her exploration of herbaria has uncovered collections and type material by botanists historically overlooked and marginalized.

Briscoe has engaged the public through museum exhibits, workshops and documentaries. She works with professors to develop various interdisciplinary class activities that use herbarium collections.  She is an editor and contributing author to the Hand Lens, an online platform that publishes stories from the NYBG herbarium for the general public. In 2016, Briscoe was featured on the botanical podcast In Defense of Plants for an episode about liverworts. She is a co-creator of the tiny hands and cryptogams educational page on Instagram.