After completing joint graduate work with Tadhg Begley and Fred McLafferty at Cornell University in 1997, Neil Kelleher joined the laboratory of Christopher T. Walsh at Harvard Medical School. This foundation in high-performance mass spectrometry and enzymology led to a decade at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in 2010 the Kelleher Group relocated to Northwestern University. Dr. Kelleher has been a driving force in technology development and the application of ultra-high-performance mass spectrometry across chemistry and biology. He has authored more than 450 publications, holds an h-index of ~100, and provides the ProSight software platform to

more than 2,000 laboratories worldwide. He has consistently advanced a diverse international cohort of scientists--mentoring more than 50 Ph.D. students, over 200 postdoctoral scholars, and more than 200 undergraduates. The core of the Kelleher Team is built around expertise in technology development for targeted applications spanning top-down proteomics—including glycoproteoforms--and metabolomics. Kelleher is the Founding President of the Consortium calling for the Human Proteoform Project, an effort to advance the sequencing of full-length proteins to parallel the impact of the Human Genome Project.

more than 2,000 laboratories worldwide. He has consistently advanced a diverse international cohort of scientists--mentoring more than 50 Ph.D. students, over 200 postdoctoral scholars, and more than 200 undergraduates. The core of the Kelleher Team is built around expertise in technology development for targeted applications spanning top-down proteomics—including glycoproteoforms--and metabolomics. Kelleher is the Founding President of the Consortium calling for the Human Proteoform Project, an effort to advance the sequencing of full-length proteins to parallel the impact of the Human Genome Project.

Dr. Lingjun Li is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor, and the Charles Melbourne Johnson Distinguished Chair in Pharmaceutical Sciences and Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She earned her Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry under Jonathan Sweedler from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and completed postdoctoral training at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory with Dick Smith and Brandeis University with Eve Marder before joining UW–Madison in December 2002.

Dr. Li has built a highly productive research program integrating advanced chemical tagging, ion mobility mass spectrometry, and spatial omics to tackle complex biomedical challenges. Her innovations in isobaric chemical labeling—including DiLeu, DeAla, and SUGAR tags—have enabled hyperplexed quantitative proteomics, glycomics, and lipidomics. These tools have accelerated high-throughput, cost-effective analyses across diverse biological systems. She and her team also pioneered single-cell mass spectrometry imaging and tissue expansion MS imaging (TEMI), opening new frontiers in spatially resolved multiomics and molecular mapping of neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, and cancer.  Dr. Li’s research has led to the discovery of over 500 novel neuropeptides in several model organisms, the first citrullinome atlas, and advanced biomarker discovery through comparative proteomics and glycoproteomic. Dr. Li has published more than 450 peer-reviewed articles, held multiple patents, and developed several software tools for omics data analysis.