Assistant Professor, Cancer Center Member, Cancer Genetics and Genomics Program
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Peter Westcott started his independent research group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2022. With a background in cancer genetics and immunology, he is broadly interested in how cancer talks with the immune system and how this conversation changes throughout cancer development. His lab is particularly focused on critical transitions in the evolution of a patient’s cancer, including when it first becomes malignant and when it first spreads to other tissues—the major cause of mortality. This focus was shaped by his graduate training with Dr. Allan Balmain at University of California San Francisco, where he spearheaded comparative studies of mutational processes in chemical carcinogen and genetically engineered mouse models of cancer (Westcott, et al., Nature, 2015), and his postdoctoral research with Dr. Tyler Jacks at MIT, where he developed innovative cancer models that capture mutational and immune interactions of human cancer (Westcott, et al., Nature Cancer, 2021; Nature Genetics, 2023). Dr. Westcott’s work has been generously funded by several awards, including a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship, NCI Career Development Award (K22), DoD Translational Team Science Award, and the V Foundation Scholar Award.
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