John Britt earned his B.A. in chemistry from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1983 and started working at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research in 1985 in the Medicinal Chemistry Laboratory. His role changed in 1989 when, upon completion of his M.S. in computer science from Hood College, he accepted the position of system manager for the Natural Products Support Group (NPSG). In 1995, he became the supervisor of the weighing laboratory and led the effort to transfer all the natural product extracts produced by the program into microtiter plates, yielding a library of more than 200,000 crude natural product extracts. In 2000, he became the supervisor of the drug preparation group, which prepared drugs for NCI-60 screening. In September 2010, he became the co-manager of the NPSG. In 2014, he started to work on the prefractionation project and designed and implemented a system for high-throughput, positive-pressure prefractionation of crude natural products. He worked to design the current automation systems in the state-of-the-art natural products automation laboratory, which has generated more than 600,000 fractions.
