[1] Brigham-Grette has contributed to international scientific collaborations, including the Lake Elgygytgyn Drilling Project in northeastern Russia, which examined past Arctic climate conditions.

While an undergraduate enrolled in a course on Glaciers and the Pleistocene at Albion College, Professor Lawrence D. Taylor inspired her to study glacial geology and paleoclimatology.

There she worked with Professor John T. Andrews (geologist), investigating the glacial and sea-level record of a region of the Cumberland Peninsula on Baffin Island.

[5] Brigham-Grette received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder in May 1985, with the dissertation entitled “Marine Stratigraphy and Amino Acid Geochronology of the Gubik Formation, western Arctic Coastal Plain, Alaska”.

[8] Brigham-Grette utilized this technique to correlate regional stratigraphic sections in order to resolve glacial geologic and sea level history.

In 1993, Brigham-Grette was promoted to Associate Professor becoming the third tenured female faculty member in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Brigham-Grette was a lead principal investigator for the Lake El’gygytgyn Drilling Project along with Dr. Martin Melles (Germany), Dr. Pavel Sergeevich Minuyk (Russia) and Dr. Christian Koeberl (Austria).

[15] Following a successful field season and interesting initial results, Brigham-Grette was awarded another NSF grant in 2000[16] to conduct sediment coring and to investigate the modern limnological conditions of the lake.

This paper was followed by another publication in Science (journal) in 2013 by Brigham-Grette and co-authors,[18] where Arctic climate history of the Pliocene portion of the Lake El’gygytgyn record was presented (2.6 to 2.8 million years ago).

[17] In the mid-Pliocene Warm Period, when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were likely similar to today, summer temperatures at Lake El’gygytgyn were approximately 8 °C higher.