At the
University of Memphis he graduated in 1977 with a B.S. in biology and in 1979 with an M.S. in botany. At the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1983 with dissertation
A Revision of Isertia (Isertieae: Rubiaceae). His doctoral advisor was
Scott A. Mori. From 1972 to 1977 Boom worked at the Memphis Museum. From 1977 and 1979 he worked as a research assistant in the
University of Tennessee's department of botany. Since 1980 he has worked in various positions at the
New York Botanical Garden. There he is, since 2012, the Bassett Maguire Curator of Botany and, since 2014, the director of the New York Botanical Garden Press. On leaves of absence from the New York Botanical Garden, he has held various temporary appointments, including president of the
All Species Foundation in 2001 and associate director for research at
Columbia University's Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC) from 2002 to 2004. He is also involved in botanical research and
nature conservation in the
Caribbean. He is director of the Caribbean Biodiversity Program, a project of the New York Botanical Garden that aims to map and protect the plants and fungi of the Caribbean. Boom is the author or coauthor of articles in
Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden,
Brittonia,
Economic Botany,
Nature, and
Systematic Botany. is a synonym of
Peperomia lanceolata. In 1998 in Costa Rica, Brian Boom married Karen Ruth Dressner. ==Selected publications==