Matthias Mann

Matthias Mann (born 10 October 1959) is a German physicist and biochemist. He is doing research in the area of mass spectrometry and proteomics.

Early life and education Born in Thuine, Lower Saxony, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Göttingen. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 at Yale University where he worked in the group of John Fenn, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Career After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Mann became group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. Later he went back to Odense as a professor of bioinformatics. Since 2005 he has been a director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich. In addition, he became a principal investigator at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research in Copenhagen.

From his research group in Martinsried originated in 2016 PreOmics, a company commercializing sample prep sets, and EVOSEP, a company commercializing protein analysis equipment.

His work has impact in various fields of mass spectrometry-based proteomics:

The peptide sequence tag approach developed at the EMBL was one of the first methods for the identification of peptides based on mass spectra and genome data. Nano-electrospray (an electrospray technique with very low flow rates) was the first method that allowed femtomole sequencing of proteins from polyacrylamide gels. A recently developed metabolic labeling technique called SILAC (stable isotope labeling with amino acids in cell culture) is widely used in quantitative proteomics.

Other activities PharmaFluidics, Member of the Advisory Board (since 2019) 2010: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling-Prize by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities 2012: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by German Research Foundation 2012: Feodor Lynen Medal 2012: Körber European Science Prize 2012: Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine 2012: Ernst Schering Prize 2015: Theodor Bücher Lecture and Medal 2015: Danish Order of Dannebrog Knights Cross 2015: Barry L. Karger Medal in Bioanalytical Chemistry 2017: Lennart Philipson Award 2023: German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology’s Otto Warburg Medal 2026: Canada Gairdner International Award