Scientific Advisory Board

Professor Ruedi Aebersold
Founder and Professor, Institute for Systems Biology (Seattle, Washington, US) Professor, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland)

Dr. Aebersold completed his undergraduate studies in biology at the University of Basel, Switzerland in 1979 and received a Ph.D. in cell biology at the Biocenter of the University of Basel in 1984. Holding fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation and EMBO, he joined the California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow (1984-86) and remained at Caltech as a senior research fellow (1986-88). In 1988, he joined the University of British Columbia in Vancouver as an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and as a senior investigator at the Biomedical Research Centre. In 1993, he relocated to the University of Washington as an Associate Professor in Molecular Biotechnology and was promoted to full Professor in 1998. He served as the Associate Director for the Science and Technology Center for Molecular Biotechnology from 1994-2000. In 2000, he left the University of Washington and joined the Institute for Systems Biology as co-founder and full faculty member. In November 2004, he assumed an appointment as Professor of Systems Biology, Institute of Biotechnology, ETH-Zurich and Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Zurich.

Dr. Aebersold's research focuses on developing new methods and technologies for quantitative proteomics and for applying this emerging technology to enhance our understanding of the structure, function, and control of complex biological systems. Current applications of quantitative proteomics technology are directed towards the discovery of proteins markers that differentiate cancer cells from their normal counterparts, to the investigation of the mechanisms of fundamental cellular processes by the comparative analysis of the gene and protein expression profiles in cells at different states, and to studies in the area of medical microbiology.

He is the 2002 recipient of the Widmer Award, the ASMS Biemann Medal, and the World Technology Network Award in the biotechnology category

Professor Steven P. Gygi
Assistant Professor and Director of Taplin Biological Mass Spectrometry Facility, Harvard Medical School (Boston, Massachusetts, US)

Dr. Gygi is a well-known proteomics researcher with extensive expertise in peptide sequencing using tandem mass spectrometery and stable isotope dilution. His research techniques enable the global identification of protein modifications, such as ubiquination.

Professor John R. Yates, III
Professor and Director,
Proteomic Mass Spectrometry Laboratory,
The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, California, US)

Dr. Yates received his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Virginia under Professor Donald Hunt. His graduate research involved the development and application of tandem mass spectrometry for sequence analysis of proteins. Following a Biotechnology Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, he moved to the Department of Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington where he attained the tenured rank of Associate Professor. He is now a Professor in the Department of Cell biology at The Scripps Research Institute. His research interests include development of integrated methods for tandem mass spectrometry analysis of protein mixtures, bioinformatics using mass spectrometry data, and proteomics. He is the lead inventor of the SEQUEST software for correlating tandem mass spectrometry data to sequences in the database and principle developed of the shotgun proteomics technique for the analysis of protein mixtures. He has received the American Society for Mass Spectrometry research award, the Pehr Edman Award in Protein Chemistry, the American Society for Mass Spectrometry Biemann Medal, the HUPO Distinguished Achievement Award in Proteomics, Herbert Sober Award from the ASBMB, and the Christian Anfinsen Award from The Protein Society. He has published over 325 scientific articles.

Professor Roman A. Zubarev
Professor,
Molecular Biometry and Ion Physics,
Uppsala University (Uppsala, Sweden)

Dr. Zubarev received his M.Sc. in Applied Physics from the Moscow Engineering-Physical Institute in Russia and his Ph.D. in Ion Physics from Uppsala University in Sweden. He is the recipient of the Curt Brunnae Award from the International Mass Spectrometry Society in 2006 and the Biemann Medal from the American Society of Mass Spectrometry in 2007.