Richard Adams

Richard Adams received his doctorate from the King’s College, University of London, in 1984. He then crossed the ocean to the United States to take a position as a postdoctoral fellow first at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, in Baltimore, Maryland, and later at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. He returned to the U.K. in 1992, to head the Confocal Microscopy Laboratory in the Department of Physiology, University of Oxford. In 1999, he received an MRC Senior Research Fellowship to work at the University of Bath, and then another in 2002, to work in Department of Anatomy at University of Cambridge. He was also appointed to his current position as University Lecturer in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge in 2002.

His group uses the zebrafish as a model to look at the morphogenetic dynamics taking place during development. They are interested in looking at how cell behavior (movement, rearrangement) is linked to overall tissue morphogenesis, in particular in CNS development during gastrulation and neurulation. They incorporate methods such as time-lapse microscopy, and quantitative image analyses to examine and understand the patterns in cell movement and reorganization. Recently, together with his collaborators, his group has developed an approach called tissue tectonics, which allows them to measure rate of tissue deformation at a very fine spatial and temporal scale. This in turn can be used to identify contributions to tissue morphogenesis caused by cell shape and those caused by cell rearrangement.

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