Britt Adamson

Britt Adamson, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University.

Dr. Adamson’s research group develops and applies innovative genomics tools to study complex cellular processes, with strong focus on understanding how cells respond to DNA damage and how fundamental cellular mechanisms promote or suppress genome editing. Recent work from the Adamson lab has enabled important technical improvements to genome editing tools. She is now recognized as a leading expert in the field.

Dr. Adamson was an undergraduate at MIT in the lab of Dr. Angelika Amon and conducted her graduate research at Harvard Medical School under the guidance of Dr. Stephen Elledge, a preeminent figure in the field of DNA repair. She earned her PhD from Harvard Medical School in 2012. Dr. Adamson then worked with Jonathan Weissman at the University of California, San Francisco, where she was an early pioneer in pairing single-cell RNA sequencing with CRISPR/Cas9 technology to understand how genetic perturbations affect gene expression at the single cell level. The approach she developed, called Perturb-seq, is now used widely to study gene function, gene regulatory networks, and cellular heterogeneity. Among other awards, Dr. Adamson was a 2020 Searle Scholar and received the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey New Investigator Award. She has served on a number of Scientific Advisory Boards.