Sydney Blattman, Ph.D.

Sydney Blattman is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dana Pe’er at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center. Blattman received her Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology from Columbia University under the mentorship of Professor Saeed Tavazoie, and she earned her B.Sc. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Brown University.

During her Ph.D., Blattman studied phenotypic heterogeneity in bacterial populations. She developed PETRI-seq, the first high-throughput single-cell sequencing technology for microbes (Nature Microbiology, 2020). By profiling heterogenous populations at single-cell resolution, she discovered a distinct molecular state corresponding to rare antibiotic-tolerant cells called persisters (Nature, 2024). In this study, she systematically identified driver genes that could be targeted to prevent formation and maintenance of the persister state. For her Ph.D. work, she received the Nat L. Sternberg and David Hirsh Thesis Prizes. At MSK, she is studying cell state transitions in cancer and continuing to develop single-cell technologies to enable new insights.