Jumping into the fray
Steven Briggs (light blue/silver suit, one o'clock, outer ring)—satisfying his detoured aerial ambitions with an active skydiving hobby—earned a fifth place finish at last year's national championships in 8-way formation competition in Skydive, Arizona
Scientifically skilled and savvy, Steven Briggs seemingly does it all. As chair of the Plant Sciences Institute board, he brings a long history of balancing academic and corporate interests to this leadership role.
Briggs is professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of California, San Diego, and a recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Additionally, the Vermont native, who grew up planning to pilot fighter jets with ambitions to become an astronaut, is now part of a team of biotech entrepreneurs brewing jet fuel in La Jolla, California.
Briggs holds the role of scientific collaborator to the microalgal-based bioenergy company, Sapphire Energy, a startup primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust and Bill Gates' investment company, Cascade Investment.
Briggs' corporate scientific career began in Iowa at Pioneer Hi-Bred International. A move to San Diego to head the Novartis Agricultural Research Institute soon put Briggs in the position of brokering the controversy-provoking $25 million agricultural biotechnologies deal in 1998 between the University of California, Berkeley, and the Swiss life sciences giant Novartis.
Analyses of the deal continue to refine guidelines for future partnerships between corporations and land-grant universities. The novel deal also helped pave the way for UC Berkeley's $500 million collaboration with oil giant BP, creating the Energy Biosciences Institute in 2007.
The Novartis Agricultural Research Institute eventually morphed into the Torrey Mesa Research Institute—a name change followed by dissolution when Novartis spun off its agricultural division creating Syngenta.
While heading the Torrey Mesa Research Institute, Briggs also led the team that produced the first draft sequence of the rice genome. Although it was an historic accomplishment, it brought about a research shift in his career.
"I was a genomics guy," says Briggs. "I decided to get out of the nucleus and start dealing with proteins."
When not tinkering with microalgae, Briggs' main research focus is on data management tool development for tracking genome-wide molecular signaling pathways.
"In the past whole cell signaling was all inferred because the tools didn't exist to study the transfer of atoms between proteins," explains Briggs.
Creating data is no longer a holdup with today's next generation sequencing capabilities. The new bottleneck is data management—making sense of all the information. Automated software-driven systems can be used to identify new gene sequences, but these systems "are only accurate for about 70 percent of the genes," says Briggs.
Instead, Briggs relies on high-throughput proteogenomics methods with improved sample preparation and mass spectrometry techniques to resolve the rest.
