[1] Adelson attended Yale University and received bachelor's degrees in physics and philosophy in 1974.
He was a postdoctoral fellow at NYU from 1979 to 1981, after which he joined RCA Laboratories as a staff scientist for five years.
During his time at RCA Laboratories, Adelson won the 1984 Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America.
[4] He joined the faculty at MIT in 1987, first at the Media Lab before moving to the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 1994.
[8] In 2022, Adelson received the Kurt Koffka Medal for "advancing the fields of perception or developmental psychology to an extraordinary extent".