Matthias Mann obtained his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Yale, contributing to the Nobel Prize for his supervisor John Fenn for the development of electrospray ionization. Currently, he heads the Proteomics and Signal Transduction department at the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich, while also directing the Proteomics Program at the Center for Protein Research at Copenhagen University.
As a pioneer in his field, Dr. Mann has made numerous groundbreaking technological advances and has developed powerful computational and proteomics workflows for a wide range of biomedical applications, increasingly emphasizing translational research. His team increasingly focuses on clinically relevant questions, such as body fluid proteomics, single-cell level tissue heterogeneity, signaling, and post-translational modifications.
With a remarkable record of over 850 publications, Dr. Mann is among Germany’s most cited researcher, with an h-index of 254 and more than 315,000 citations according to Google Scholar. His mentorship has fostered the success of many researchers, and his group at the MPIB has spurred the formation of three start-up companies.
Dr. Mann’s outstanding contributions have garnered him numerous prestigious accolades, including the Otto-Warburg Medal, Germany’s Leibniz Prize, the Körber European Science Prize, the Louis-Jeantet Foundation Prize for Medicine, the HUPO Distinguished Achievement Award in Proteomic Science, and ‘The Order of Dannebrog Knights Cross’ conferred by the Queen of Denmark.

Kathryn received her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Sheffield. After being a laboratory manager for eleven years, she established the Cambridge Centre for Proteomics, University of Cambridge in 2001. She became the Professor in Cellular Dynamics in Department of Biochemistry University of Cambridge in 2012. She directs a research programme focused on the development and application of technologies to map RNA and protein subcellular localization on a cell-wide scale. Her research looks at the effect of post transcriptional and post translational processing on location, and the extent of re-localization in response to cellular stress and disease.
She was awarded the Juan Pablo Albar Proteome Pioneer Award from the European Proteomics Association in 2017 and received the HUPO Distinguished Achievements in Proteomics award in 2018. She was elected as a member of EMBO in July 2020 and Academia Europaea in May 2023.

Professor Nicholson obtained his PhD from St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, King’s College, University of London in 1980. After a series of academic appointments in Pharmacology and Chemistry at Birkbeck and University College London, he made full Professor of Biological Chemistry in 1992. He was subsequently appointed as Professor and Head of Biological Chemistry at Imperial College London in 1998 and Head the Department of Surgery and Cancer from 2009 to 2018, Director for the Centre for Gut and Digestive Health, and Director of the MRC-NIHR National Phenome Centre (2012-2018). Since 2018 he has been Emeritus Professor at Imperial College, London. He became the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences at Murdoch University and Director of the Australian National Phenome Centre in Perth, Western Australia in 2019. One of the pioneers of biological NMR spectroscopy, metabolic phenotyping and systems medicine, his major research focus is on the development of diagnostic and prognostic molecular phenotyping analytical technologies as applied to personalised healthcare, metabolic disease, and population phenotyping. For the last 3 years he has been leading an international group working on the metabolic sequelae of and long-term complications of COVID-19. He is a “Highly-Cited” Researcher in Pharmacology and Toxicology and Cross-Field Science between 2013 and 2022 (Clarivate H index = 137, Google H = 161, 110K citations) and has received various research prizes including: The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Silver (1992) and Gold (1997) Medals for Analytical Science and Analytical Chemistry respectively; The UK Chromatographic Society Jubilee Silver Medal (1994); Pfizer International Prize for Chemical and Medicinal Technology (2002); RSC medal for Chemical Biology (2003); RSC Interdisciplinary Prize (2008); Pfizer Global Research Prize for Chemistry (2006) and the Semmelweis-Budapest International Prize for Biomedicine (2010). He holds multiple visiting, and Honorary Professorships including Fudan University, Shanghai, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, The Mayo Clinic, University of New South Wales, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, University of Western Australia, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, and Dalian. He was elected, Fellow of The UK Academy of Medical Sciences (2010); Honorary Lifetime Fellow of the International Metabolomics Society (2012); Honorary Lifetime Member of the US Society of Toxicology (2013); Albert Einstein Honorary Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2014); Elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (London) (2018); Honorary Doctor of Science, Honoris Causa (Hong Kong Baptist University), in 2020; Residential Honorary Professor – Faculty of Medicine, Khon Kaen University, Thailand (2023).

Shin has obtained an MD degree from Seoul National University Medical College in 1974 and a PhD degree on genetics and cell biology from Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Cornell University Medical College in 1983. He taught at MIT in USA, and POSTECH in Korea. He was the founding Director of Brain Science Institute, Korea Institute for Science and Technology (KIST), and then Director of Center for Cognition and Sociality, Institute for Basic Science (IBS). After stepping down from the directorship of Center for Cognition and Sociality, he continues his research as an Honorary Fellow at IBS.
Since mid-90’s his group has been studying neural mechanisms of animal behaviors, primarily focusing on the role of the thalamus in normal and diseased brains. His approach has been to elucidate the behavioral and physiological consequences of deranged regulation of intracellular Ca2+ levels in brain cells which is induced by gene knock-out. Three groups of genes were targeted: voltage-gated Ca2+ channels for Ca2+ entry into cells, phospholipase C enzymes for Ca2+ release from internal stores upon activation of metabotropic receptors, and Na+/Ca2+ exchangers driving Ca2+ out to restore the resting Ca2+ level.
Beginning in 2010 his research interest has evolved to include neurobiology of social behaviors. He has pioneered to establish a behavioral paradigm, observational fear learning in mice, a rodent model for emotional contagion which is the basic form of affective empathy. This mouse model allowed, for the first time, to study affective empathy at the molecular and cellular levels. Using this animal model, his group has been able to define genes, circuits, and brain rhythms that control empathy behavior. This behavioral paradigm is becoming a widely adopted model in the field of social neuroscience to study neurobiology of empathy.