NewS

The Nominations and Elections Committee welcomes Sisi Wu as the new Co-chair, who will join Aleksandra Nita-Lazar in managing the activities of the NEC.

Dr. Wu received her Ph.D. from the Washington State University (James Bruce’s laboratory), developing novel methods for mass spectrometry-based proteomics. Between 2006 and 2008, she conducted her postdoctoral research on top-down proteomics at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) with Drs. Ljiljiana Pasa-Tolic and Richard Smith. Later, she worked as a research scientist at Battelle Toxicology Northwest (2008-2010) and a senior scientist at PNNL (2010-2014). In 2015, Dr. Wu joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Oklahoma as an assistant professor. Sisi has nearly 20 years of experience in developing advanced top-down and bottom-up proteomics techniques to understand protein dynamics and functions in different biological systems. She is particularly interested in solving clinical and biological questions through integrating technologies in life sciences, biology, separation science, MS instrumentation, and bioinformatics. Her research program is focused on development and application of the new top-down MS and functional proteomics technologies in order to characterize intact proteins and their modified proteoforms. Sisi had been a HUPO Council member since 2019.

Join us for the HUPO ReCONNECT ECR Networking Hour on November 16th, 2021 at 21:15 (UTC)!

The ECR Networking Hour is an open forum session to bridge the digital, cultural, and continental gaps so that early career researchers can meet, share, and create connections for future collaborations and support in their job search. Participants are encouraged to engage with their cameras on and join in our icebreaker and proteomics-related networking activities. In preparation for the ECR Networking Hour, participants are also encouraged to set up a LinkedIn or Twitter handle to keep the engagement going beyond November 16th!

The HUPO Early Career Researcher Initiative is actively working on diversifying its team members to be more representative of the global proteomics community. It is with our utmost pleasure to introduce our two new members Dr. Mio Iwasaki, an Assistant Professor at Kyoto University, Japan, and Dr. Dongxue Wang, a Research Scientist at the National Center for Protein Science in Beijing, China. We look forward to their contributions moving forward! Please read more about Dr. Iwasaki and Dr. Wang below.

Mio Iwasaki is an assistant professor at the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application, Kyoto University, Japan. In March 2013, she obtained her Ph.D. in Dr. Ishihama’s lab at Kyoto University. She is now working on identifying essential post-transcriptionally regulated genes in each cell type and tissue. She is also a member of jPOST, which is the Japanese proteome database repository with a nice user interface and a quite fast data uploading system.

Dongxue Wang, is a research scientist at the National Center for Protein Science in Beijing (NCPSB), China. She was trained as a system biologist trained in mass spectrometry by Bernhard Kuster at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. After obtaining her Ph.D. in 2018, she joined NCPSB. Dongxue is developing and applying state-of-the-art proteomic methods to quantitate protein expression in tissues and bodily fluids, to better understand the human biology and diseases.

We are so excited to announce some of the mentors that are confirmed for our ECR Mentoring Session speakers for HUPO ReCONNECT 2021. The three sessions taking place throughout the conference will cover three different topics and are shaping up to be ones to remember! Check out our roster below:

How to successfully balance a personal life while in academia (November 15th, 2021 at 16:00 UTC)

1. Dr. Christine Carapito, University of Strasbourg
2. Dr. Harry Whitwell, Imperial College London
3. Dr. Jennifer Geddes-McAlister, University of Guelph

Scientific Integrity (November 17th, 2021 at 20:00 UTC)

1. Dr. Stephen Pennington, University College Dublin
2. Dr. Suzanne Farley, Editorial Director at PLOS

Getting started on writing manuscripts, grants, and fellowships (November 19th, 2021 at 4:30 UTC)

1. Dr. Yasushi Ishihama, Kyoto University
2. Dr. Rebekah L. Gundry, University of Nebraska
3. A representative from Molecular Omics

The HUPO Early Career Researcher (ECR) Initiative would like to extend a big thank you to everyone who entered the ECR Manuscript Competition. The competition was fierce! We would like to further congratulate our three finalists, Dr. Yangsheng Liu (Yale University, USA), Dr. Stacey Malaker (Yale University, USA), and Dr. Mehdi Bouhaddou (University of California, San Francisco, USA), who will be presenting their research in a dedicated session at HUPO ReCONNECT 2021 on November 17th at 23:00 (UTC). Learn more about our finalists below.

Dr. Yansheng Liu received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from the Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011. He then completed a 6.5-year post-doctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Ruedi Aebersold at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. In December 2017, he joined the faculty at the Yale Cancer Biology Institute and the Department of Pharmacology at Yale. His research group at Yale aims to contribute to the development of multiplexed, high-throughput data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry (DIA-MS) technique and other proteomic methods, as well as their applications in protein turnover, cancer aneuploidy, and cancer signaling transduction. Dr. Liu has co-authored 55 publications with a total citation of 4,500 times. Dr. Liu has received the 2021 ASMS research award. He serves as an editorial board member of Proteomics and Proteomics-Clinical Applications, a scientific advisory board member for Review Commons, and a member of the HUPO Awards Committee.

Dr. Stacey Malaker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Yale University. Her laboratory is focused on establishing methods and technology to study mucins, a class of densely O-glycosylated extracellular proteins, by MS. Additionally, the laboratory studies mucins in a biological context, since these proteins play integral, yet poorly understood, roles in numerous diseases. Prior to her appointment at Yale, she received her B.S. from the University of Michigan in Biochemistry and Anthropology-Zoology. Dr. Malaker then went on to receive her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Virginia in the laboratory of Professor Donald Hunt. She continued to investigate the role of aberrant glycosylation in cancer as an NIH postdoctoral fellow in Professor Carolyn Bertozzi’s laboratory at Stanford University before starting at Yale in 2021.

Dr. Mehdi (“Meh-Di”) Bouhaddou acquired his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and his PhD in Biomedical Sciences at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He is currently a National Cancer Institute postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) advised by Dr. Nevan Krogan. Using both experimental and computational approaches, Mehdi specializes in integrating large biological datasets to understand how diseases, and potential therapies, can rewire cellular signaling. During his PhD, Mehdi developed mechanistic mathematical models of cancer signaling pathways, depicting their dynamical behavior in response to anti-cancer agents. He has since repurposed his skills in bioinformatics and molecular biology to study SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses of pandemic potential, with a specific focus on studying the functional effects of viral and host post-translational modifications (phosphorylation) that occur during infection. 

Can you speak more than one language? Are you interested in contributing to a global effort to make proteomics more visible? Are you interested in increasing your visibility within the scientific community?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, HUPO Marketing and Outreach Committee (MOC) would love to hear from you.

We are looking for individuals who are willing to translate existing and new HUPO material from English to different languages, to increase the HUPO outreach and to make proteomics more visible globally. The translated material (acknowledging the name of the translator) will be utilized within existing HUPO media channels, as well as to build relationships with local (e.g. continent or country-specific) proteomics societies and other societies.

In return, this opportunity will increase your visibility within the HUPO and the wider proteomics community, and additional unforeseen benefits.

If you are interested in participating please reach out via marketing@hupo.org.

Catchup on the latest HUPO updates in the August HUPOST: 

https://conta.cc/3BUAwer

The Nominations and Elections Committee presents the official slate of candidates for the 2021 HUPO Council election. We would like to thank all candidates standing for Council election for a three-year term beginning in January 2022 (2022-2024). The election period for HUPO Council is October 26 – November 16, 2021.

The list of candidates is available here. We encourage you to review the slate of candidates prior to the election opening date.

HUPO members will receive a voting email from Simply Voting on October 26^th. 

Nominations are now open for HUPO Executive Committee positions. This is an opportunity to lead the future of an important scientific organization and work with an enthusiastic global team to promote and represent proteomics.

The following positions will be elected by Council vote for a two-year term and commence in January 2022:

• President-Elect (2022), President (2023-2024), Past President (2025)
• Vice President (2022-2023)
• ECR Representative (2022-2023) - appointed by the ECR, ratified by Council

Click here to view a list of the current HUPO Executive Committee.

For information on how to apply, please click here.

The deadline to submit self-nominations is August 31, 2021.

We look forward to your participation.

Remembering a pioneering scientist, distinguished leader and our good friend on the journey to advance mass spectrometry-based proteomics

We are deeply saddened by the loss of a distinguished colleague and friend in the HUPO community, Prof. Pengyuan Yang, Executive Vice Director of the BioMedical Sciences and Principal Researcher of the Biological Mass Spectrometry Group, Fudan University, in May 31, 2021.

Pengyuan received his PhD from the department of chemistry, University of Massachusetts and worked as a post-doc in Indiana University and Xiamen University. He then joined Xiamen University and Fudan University to start his career. Throughout his life, Pengyuan has been devoted to the development of instrumentation and methodology in the fields of analytical chemistry and proteomics. Pengyuan pioneered mass spectrometry-based instrumentation and methodology when proteomics was still in its infancy. With his keen vision, he constructed the very first ESI-Q-TOF mass spectrometer in China and kept promoting the development of mass spectrometry instruments and their application in proteomics. Pengyuan has made extraordinary contributions to the development of proteomics research in China. He has led two national “973” projects aiming to develop advanced proteomics and microfluidics, starting in the historical period when scientists gradually shifted their 2D gel to mass spectrometry-based proteomics. He also led one national “863” project aiming to develop MS instrumentation and relevant reagents. He has published more than 500 articles with over 16,000 citations. In particular, he has developed a series of techniques for identification and quantification of the glycoproteome, in particular pGlyco. These “sweet” techniques and informatic tools will remain a great legacy to benefit the study of the highly complex glycobiology.

We are so grateful to have Pengyuan with his life-long contribution to HUPO. Until the last stage in his life, Pengyuan actively participated in the Human Proteome Project (HPP) under HUPO. He served as an elected council member of HUPO, and past member-at-large of the Human Proteome Project (HPP), playing key role to direct and coordinate the activities of HPP.He also was a leading member under the Human Disease Glycomics/Proteome Initiative (HGPI). Aligned with the international efforts under the chromosome-centric Human Proteome Project (C-HPP), he also lead a team to decode the protein compositions of chromosome-8 and understand the biological context of the protein parts list. PangYuan’s passion, efforts and contribution to the proteomics community are highly recognized and appreciated.

We believe that the spirit of PengYuan will live on. His legacy will be inherited by more researchers and continue to contribute to create new generations of instruments, applications of mass spectrometry and their translation into precision medicine. On behave of HUPO, we would like offer our condolences to Pengyuan's family.

Yu-Ju Chen, President
Susan E Weintraub, Vice President
Henning Hermjakob, Secretary-general
On behalf of Human Proteome Organization (HUPO)

Huali Shen, Professor
On behalf of Pengyuan Yang’s group