Speakers

Andrews is Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a member of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior, the Hatos Center for Neuropharmacology, and the California NanoSystems Institute.  

Dr. Andrews is an elected Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and past President of the International Society for Serotonin Research. She has received an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, a California Neurotechnologies Research Award, and an IUPAC Distinguished Women in Chemistry Award, among others.  

At UCLA, Andrews leads efforts in basic and translational research on brain chemistry at the nexus of neuroscience and nanoscience. Her interdisciplinary team develops methods and devices to investigate neurotransmission at high spatial, temporal, and chemical resolution to understand the etiology and treatment of anxiety and mood disorders, and to advance personalized predictive medicine. 

Dr. H. Tom Soh is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Radiology at Stanford University. His laboratory develops synthetic biomaterials and biosensor devices. He earned his B.S. (1992), with a double major in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science with Distinction from Cornell University and his M.S. (1995) and Ph.D. (1999) in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Between 1999 and 2003, he served as a technical manager of MEMS device research group at Bell Laboratories and Agere Systems. Between 2003 and 2015, he was the Ruth Garland Professor at UC-Santa Barbara (UCSB) in the department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials. His lab moved to Stanford in 2015. He is a recipient of numerous awards including MIT Technology Review’s “TR 100” Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, Beckman Young Investigator Award, ALA Innovator Award, NIH Director’s TR01 Award, NIH Edward Nagy Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Alexander van Humboldt Fellowship. Dr. Soh is a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). 

Heather Desaire is the Dean’s Professor of Chemistry at the University of Kansas, where she has been on the faculty since 2002.  She started her studies in Chemistry at Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA, where she earned a BA in 1997, and continued them at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her PhD in 2001.  She spent a few months working in the pharmaceutical industry prior to starting her appointment at the University of Kansas.  Her current research interests span the fields of mass spectrometry, machine learning, and glycobiology.  She received a MIRA award from the National Institutes of Health to combine machine learning and omics analyses, and she has been recognized by the University of Kansas for excellence in teaching.

Lars Juhl Jensen started his research career in Søren Brunak’s group at the Technical University of Denmark, from where he in 2002 received the Ph.D. degree in bioinformatics, having worked on methods for protein function prediction, visualization of microbial genomes, pattern recognition in promoter regions, and microarray analysis. From 2003 to 2008, he was at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory working on text mining, integration of omics data, and network analysis. Since 2009, he has continued this line of research as a professor at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen and as a founder and scientific advisor of ZS | Intomics.

He has authored and co-authored more than 200 scientific publications that have received over 50,000 citations in total. He was awarded the Lundbeck Foundation Talent Prize in 2003, “Break-through of the Year” in 2006 by the magazine Ingeniøren, and the Lundbeck Foundation Prize for Young Scientists in 2010.

Isabell Bludau is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Matthias Mann at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry near Munich. She is specialized in computational proteomics and systems biology. During her PhD with Prof. Ruedi Aebersold at ETH Zurich, Isabell developed computational methods for analyzing large-scale proteomics data. She specifically worked on the detection and quantification of protein complexes. Recently, Isabell’s work focuses on the inference of proteoforms and their integration with structural information. Isabell’s PhD thesis was awarded with the ETH silver medal and her postdoctoral research is supported by a Postdoc.Mobility fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Thanh Do is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tennessee. He earned his B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics from Gonzaga University. He received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from University of California, Santa Barbara under the mentorship of Prof. Michael Bowers. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Prof. Jonathan Sweedler at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign before joining the Department of Chemistry at University of Tennessee as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2018. The overarching aims of his research are two-fold. The first is to develop fast and sensitive MS-based techniques and biophysical methods suitable for simultaneously assessing and predicting the structure, topology, composition and dynamics of exotic species in the gas phase. These species include small molecules, peptides, and proteins in complex mixtures and volume-limited samples. The second overarching aim is to use these techniques for biological applications.

Dr. Chouinard is an Assistant Professor in the Chemistry Department at Clemson University. He received Bachelor’s degrees in Chemistry and Biology from UNC-Chapel Hill. He then did his Ph.D. work under the supervision of Rick Yost at University of Florida, developing ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) methods for analysis of small molecule metabolites.  As a post-doctoral research at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Dr. Chouinard helped to implement Structures for Lossless Ion Manipulations (SLIM) IM-MS hardware for a range of metabolomic and proteomic applications. Prior to his current his position, Dr. Chouinard was an Assistant Professor at Florida Institute of Technology from 2018-2022. His research group focuses on a novel combination of IM-MS methods, organic reactions, and computational modeling for analysis of steroid compounds.

A native of Florida, Kelly completed her undergraduate studies in Chemistry at the University of Florida. After graduating with honors in 2009, Kelly joined the Department of Chemistry at Vanderbilt University as a graduate student. Her research in the lab of John A. McLean focused on the development of ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) methods for the identification of metabolite, lipid, and peptide biomolecular signatures of disease from complex biological samples. After receiving her Ph.D. in 2014, Dr. Hines completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Mayo Clinic Regional Metabolomics Core where she established quantitative MS methods for lipidomics and protein metabolism using isotope labeling. In 2015, Dr. Hines joined the lab of Libin Xu at the University of Washington. Her work in the Xu Lab focused on the development of IM-MS methods for lipidomics, high-throughput IM-MS measurements of drugs and small molecules, and the significance of lipids in human diseases, environmental exposure and antibiotic resistance. Kelly has authored research publications in top-tier analytical chemistry and molecular sciences journals such as Analytical Chemistry, Journal of Lipid Research, and Molecular Cell. Kelly has been the recipient of several noteworthy awards, including a U.S. Pharmacopoeia Fellowship, the ACS Dan Su Travel Award, and several Young Investigator travel awards. She is most proud of being selected as a Finalist for the University of Washington Graduate School Postdoc Mentoring Award during her time at UW. Outside the lab, Kelly is an avid reader of fiction, a college football enthusiast and enjoys being outdoors.

Ji-Xin Cheng attended University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) from 1989 to 1994. From 1994 to 1998, he carried out his PhD study on bond-selective chemistry at USTC. As a graduate student, he worked as a research assistant at Universite Paris-sud (France) on vibrational spectroscopy and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) on quantum dynamics theory. After postdoctoral training on ultrafast spectroscopy at HKUST, he joined Sunney Xie’s group at Harvard University as a postdoc, where he spearheaded the development of CARS microscopy that allows high-speed vibrational imaging. Cheng joined Purdue University in 2003 as Assistant Professor in Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Chemistry, promoted to Associate Professor in 2009 and Full Professor in 2013. He joined Boston University as the Inaugural Theodore Moustakas Chair Professor in Photonics and Optoelectronics in summer 2017.

Welcome to Cheng Lab

Xinrong Zhang received his Bachelor and Master degree from Shaanxi Normal University, China and Ph.D. degree from Ghent University, Belgium. He worked in Shaanxi Normal University since 1985 and became the professor there in 1993. He joined Tsinghua University as professor in Analytical Center, Department of Chemistry since 1998. His current interests include method development and application of mass spectrometry and luminescence analysis. He published over 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals, such as Nature Methods, JACS, Angew Chem, Anal Chem, etc. He is now the Executive Editor of Analytical Chemistry (ACS).

Andrew Ewing is Professor of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is a Knut and Alice Wallenberg Scholar (2011-2023), an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, class 4 (chemistry), Nobel Class (2012) and the Gothenburg Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013). His research focusses on the neuronal process of exocytosis pioneering small-volume chemical measurements at single nerve cells and the contents of individual nanometer vesicles in cells as well as mass spectrometry imaging of cells and organelles.

Hossam Haick is a Full Professor in the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and head of five major European consortia. Highly multi-disciplinary in nature, the research of Prof. Haick focuses on novel solid-state and flexible devices/sensors as well as electronic sensory nanoarrays non-invasive diagnosis of diseases via volatile biomarkers. Prof. Haick’s comprehensive approach comprises materials and device development, system integration, testing in lab and clinical environments and exploitation of project results/hardware. Prof. Haick has received more than 72 prizes and recognitions, including the Knight of the Order of Academic Palms, the Humboldt Senior Research Award, the “Michael Bruno” Prize, the Changjiang Award, the OXYGEN Award, etc. He was also included in more than 42 important ranking lists, such as the of the world’s 35 leading young scientists by MIT Magazine (2008), top-100 innovators in the world (2015-2018) by various international organizations, etc.

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