#4 Matthias Mann
The Power List 2021
Professor of Proteomics and Signal Transduction, Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Munich, Germany; Director at the NNF Protein Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark
Heroes? By far the largest influence on my scientific life has been the late John Fenn (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2002). He was the kindest and most modest person you could imagine and treated his lab members more like family then like employees. He also always went against the grain and was very successful doing this. Profs. Peter Toennies, Director at the Max Planck Institute, where I did my master’s degree, was one of the best experimental scientists in Germany and excelled in completely different ways. Finally, Prof. Peter Roepstorff in Denmark who really got me to apply mass spectrometry to biological problems.
In another life… I might be a computer person, specifically developing algorithms and analyzing data – preferably multi-dimensional proteomics data. One of my typical jokes: “I much prefer programming to working.”
