Panel Discussion: Mass Spectrometry

Dr. Nick Riley is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington. He is originally from Louisville, KY and earned his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of South Carolina. He then moved to Madison, WI for his graduate studies with Prof. Josh Coon at UW-Madison, where he worked on mass spectrometry instrumentation and proteomics methodology. He focused on methods involving electron transfer dissociation, which introduced him to glycoproteomics. His newfound interest in glycoproteins led him to a postdoc with Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford University, where he worked on new chemical biology, mass spec, and informatic tools to characterize mucin-domain glycoproteins and cell-type specific secretomes. Since starting his group in Seattle in fall 2023, his group uses state-of-the-art mass spectrometry and chemical glycobiology to develop innovative technologies for investigating glycoproteome regulation. Specifically, the Riley Research Group is interested in understanding how altered cell surface phenotypes manifest in cancer progression and drive metastasis.

Gérard Hopfgartner received his Ph.D. degree in 1991 in the field of organic geochemistry and mass spectrometry at the University of Geneva. Then he moved to Cornell University as a postdoctoral fellow working on atmospheric pressure ionization LC-MS/MS. From 1992 to 2002 he headed the LC-MS group and the bioanalytical section as a scientific expert at F. offmann-La Roche in Basel. In 2002 he joined the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Geneva and Lausanne as a Full Professor for analytical sciences and mass spectrometry. Since August 2015 he is full Professor in the Department of Analytical and Inorganic Chemistry of the University of Geneva. His research interests focus on the development of multimodal mass spectrometry approaches with and without separation sciences in the field of life sciences.

Simone Sidoli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He began his mass spectrometry (MS) training in Prof. Careri's lab at the University of Parma, Italy, where he developed methods to detect food allergens, contributing to Parma's food safety sector. For his PhD, he joined the Protein Research Group at the University of Southern Denmark under Ole N. Jensen. There, he developed protein analysis methods, processed large datasets, and maintained advanced instrumentation. Collaborating with the Biotech Research & Innovation Center (BRIC) in Copenhagen, he studied histone modifications in embryonic stem cells using his middle-down MS workflow for unbiased identification and quantification of co-existing histone marks. In 2014, Simone joined Ben Garcia's lab at the Epigenetics Institute, University of Pennsylvania. He advanced proteomics and computational approaches to link protein phosphorylation with chromatin changes and studied proteome regulation during viral infections. His contributions improved histone code quantification, increased throughput, assessed chromatin accessibility, and optimized middle-down MS strategies. Simone has been a member of professional organizations such as the American Society of Mass Spectrometry (ASMS), the Human Proteome Organization (HUPO), and the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS). In February 2019, Simone joined the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and officially launched his lab in July. He is affiliated with the Einstein Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Nathan Shock Institute for Aging Research, the Einstein-Rockefeller-CUNY Center for AIDS Research, and the Einstein Institute for Neuroimmunology and Inflammation. Since April 2020, he has served as the Scientific Director of the Proteomics Core, advancing research in the field.