[9] Between 1955 and 1967, Briggs was an instructor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University and successively became an assistant professor in 1957.

From 1993 until his death in 2019, he continued to do research as a director emeritus in the Department of Plant Biology at Carnegie Institution for Science.

He demonstrated through experiments that the phototropic bending of plant stems to follow a light source has its basis in the transport of auxin.

Briggs was (co-) author of articles in journals such as American Journal of Botany, Nature, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Science and Scientific American.

[19] He organized volunteers in 2007 to study the park's recovery from a wildfire, and discovered that the smoke contained chemicals that helped to stimulate the sprouting of seeds of rare plants that lie dormant and return after a fire.