NewS

In partnership with the European Proteomics Association’s Young Proteomics Investigators Club (YPIC), the HUPO ECR Initiative hosted its second online panel discussion on September 27th at 10AM EDT (2PM UTC). Our panelists, Dr. Kathryn Lilley (University of Cambridge), Dr. Tharan Srikumar (Bruker), and Dr. Lindsay Pino (Talus Bio), shared their insights on managing expectations between a supervisor and oneself, which sparked lively conversations with attendees in the audience. Thank you to everyone who attended, our panelists, and our panel chair, Andreas Hober (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)! If you missed the live webinar you can view the recording here.

The next panel will be on Choosing and Managing Collaborations: Do’s and Don’ts. Stay tuned for more details and registration information!

Thank you to all of those who submitted an abstract for the HUPO ReCONNECT 2021 Graduate Student Poster Competition, sponsored by Molecular Omics! We are thrilled to report that 60 Master’s and Ph.D. students have entered the running. After careful evaluations over the coming days, eight finalists will be selected and granted the opportunity to present a short talk in a dedicated session at HUPO ReCONNECT 2021 (November 15th, 20:00 UTC) and an expert committee will declare a winner ($300 prize) and two runner ups ($150 prizes). Good luck to all our participants!

The election period to vote for the HUPO Council is October 18 - November 14, 2021. All active HUPO members will receive an email containing online voting instructions on October 18. The official slate of candidates can be viewed here. Please register as a member if you wish to receive a voting ballot.

The HUPO General Assembly of Members (GAM) will take place virtually at HUPO ReCONNECT 2021. To accommodate global time zones, two online GAM sessions will be offered as follows (you do not need to attend both sessions):

• GAM Session 1: Tuesday, November 16 @ 20:00-21:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)
• GAM Session 2: Thursday, November 18 @ 05:45-06:45 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)

All active HUPO members will receive an email containing login details to both sessions. Members are encouraged to attend.

Real-World Precision Medicine: Proteogenomics to Accelerate Drug Development and Patient Care (90minutes)

October 18, 2021
08:00 PDT (UTC-7), 11:00 EDT (UTC-4), 15:00 UTC

Ever since the announcement of the Precision Medicine Initiative, there have been increasing efforts to identify and understand the basis of cancer using high-throughput technologies and the development of specialized treatments for specific subtypes of cancer, based on molecular evidence. Clinical proteogenomics is an exciting opportunity to complement the gene testing-centric clinical community for precision medicine. However, translating proteomic measurements to real-world patient care requires synergy of multiple requirements: meaningful and actionable molecular characterization, clinical and analytical validation, defining diagnosis values, and meeting regulatory compliance.

Speakers: 

Register for the webinar.

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.