Lisa Jones
Professor and Chancellor's Associates Endowed Chair in Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California San Diego, USA
An inspirational leader? Jenny Van Eyk! The scale that she does research on is amazing. Her focus on personalized medicine is admirable because this is so difficult. She is always at the forefront of the field – whether that be in automation, instrumentation, or bioinformatics. Her ability to do that in multiple areas is exceptional. And on top of that, she is a very nice person. She is always willing to take time to talk about my research plans or help me with issues that I am having. She is so supportive of women in mass spectrometry.
Biggest challenge facing the field? I think a challenge for the field is the perceived lack of biological importance of analytical measurements. Analytical methods are often looked at as just tools used to support the more important biological science. There is a lack of respect in some ways for what analytical measurements bring to science.
The decade’s most important development? I think the development of single-cell proteomics has been very important. The ability to study cellular heterogeneity from a protein perspective is essential owing to post-transcriptional and post-translational regulation reducing the correlation between transcriptomics and proteomics. Workflows such as nanoPOTS and SCoPE-MS have provided unprecedented protein level information on cellular heterogeneity. To think how much this field has already accomplished in a short time. The potential of the method is vast and could have high impact in several research areas.
