Leah Briscoe

Leah Briscoe is a Data Scientist at Bayer Crop Science working at the intersection of AI and trait development for next-generation crop products. She partners with gene expression scientists to develop strategies for engineering transgene expression, enabling robust and precise gene expression in crops. Her work applies genomic foundation models and machine learning to biological sequence design, accelerating the path from computational prediction to field-ready traits.Prior to Bayer, Leah earned her Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from UCLA as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, where she developed novel statistical and computational methods for large-scale biological sequence data. Her doctoral research included model development for DNA-based microbial forensics and statistical approaches to reduce false positive rates in disease prediction from metagenomics data.Leah is passionate about bridging AI-driven biodesign with real-world agricultural challenges and driving cross-functional collaboration between data science and domain experts to bring engineered biology from concept to crop.