Matthias Mann studied physics and mathematics at Göttingen University in Germany and obtained his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Yale where his work contributed to the Nobel Prize for his supervisor John Fenn in 2002 for the development of electrospray ionization. At the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Matthias Mann and his group pioneered a set of technologies that were groundbreaking for the field: the Peptide Sequence Tag algorithm, the first to identify peptides in sequence databases by their mass spectrometric fragmentation spectra, a method to liberate peptides efficiently from polyacrylamide gels and the ultrasensitive ‘nanoelectrospray’ method. This trifecta enabled extremely sensitive sequencing, identification and analysis of proteins. Thereafter, at the University of Southern Denmark, he developed SILAC, a paradigm-shifting method of quantitative proteomics and a breakthrough in the mapping of protein interactions.

In 2005, Matthias Mann was appointed head of the Department of Proteomics and Signal Transduction at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried near Munich and since 2007 has an additional appointment as director of the Department of Proteomics, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen.

The Mann laboratory is a technological leader in the field of mass spectrometry and has pushed the technology for deeper coverage of proteomes. The group has pioneered key advances in sample preparation, chromatography, mass spectrometry and computer algorithms to make mass spectrometry-based proteomics applicable to molecular biology. Today, apart from proteomics technology development, the main focus of the groups is on clinically relevant topics, such as the analysis of the blood plasma or CSF proteome for proteomic screening of large clinical cohorts for biomarker discovery and understanding functional tissue heterogeneity and cell signaling at single-cell level in human health and disease. Matthias Mann has authored over 850 publications and is among the highest cited German researchers with an h-Index of 255 and over 315,000 citations (Google Scholar). He has mentored many successful researchers over the years and four start-up companies have emerged from his group. He is the recipient of prestigious honors including Germany’s top scientific prize, the Leibniz Prize, the Körber European Science Prize, the Louis-Jeantet Foundation Prize for Medicine, the Otto Warburg Medal, the Ernst Schering Prize, and the HUPO Distinguished Achievement Award in Proteomic Science as well as ‘The Order of Dannebrog Knights Cross’ by her Majesty the Queen of Denmark, among others.

After PhD training in the McLafferty lab at Cornell, Neil Kelleher has invented new methods to discover the exact molecular forms of proteins. The world has come to call these “proteoforms” and Kelleher uses “top-down” proteomics to discover, characterize and assign function to them with increasing efficiency. After a breakthrough Nature paper in 2011, Kelleher has continued to push the boundaries of proteomics, most recently culminating in a publication in Science (2022, 375: 411-418). Perspectives published by Kelleher and a consortium of like-minded researchers over the last decade articulating the value of proteoforms and a landmark project to map all proteoforms in the human body (Sci. Adv. 2021, 7: eabk0734) typify their thought leadership in a field seeing a new crescendo of interest and activity in the 2020s.

Ryan Kelly is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Brigham Young University (BYU). He received his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from BYU in 2005 and spent the next 13 years at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory before returning to BYU in 2018. A central theme of Dr. Kelly’s research has been the development of new technological solutions for ultrasensitive biochemical analyses. His current research focuses on developing sample preparation, separations, mass spectrometry data acquisition and analysis strategies for single-cell and spatial proteomics.

Ying Ge, Ph.D. Cornell University with Professors Fred McLafferty and Tadhg Begley, 2002.  She is currently a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Department of Cell and Regenerative Biology and Department of Chemistry at UW-Madison. Her research is highly interdisciplinary that cuts across the traditional boundaries of chemistry, biology, and medicine. She has devoted her past two decades in developing and applying top-down mass spectrometry-based proteomics to biomedical research. She has received numerous awards such as ASMS Biemann Medal (2020), HUPO Clinical and Translational Proteomics Sciences Award (2021), and The Top 10 Analytical Scientist Power List (in North America, 2020).

Dr. Yu (Tom) Gao obtained his B.S. from Peking University’s School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, then his Ph.D. in Chemical Biology with Dr. Thomas Kodadek at Scripps Florida. He conducted his post-doctoral research with Dr. John Yates III at Scripps Research and joined the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Pharmacy in 2018. Gao Lab’s research concentrates on highly sensitive proteomics methods for single-cell resolution proteome investigation. These methods aid in detecting single circulating tumor cells from plasma and elucidate cancer heterogeneity. Recently, the Gao Lab developed the world’s first container-less cell processing system, LevCell (cell.lab.gy), enabling highly sensitive and high-throughput single-cell sample preparation for proteomics.