Dr. Glunde is Professor of Radiology, Oncology and Biological Chemistry at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the founding Director of the Applied Imaging Mass Spectrometry (AIMS) Core. Her research program focuses on cancer biology and molecular imaging of cancer. Her lab combines molecular biology and cancer biology approaches with multi-scale molecular imaging to investigate and visualize molecular events that drive cancer growth, invasion, and metastasis. Imaging technologies used in Dr. Glunde's lab span magnetic resonance imaging, magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging, mass spectrometry imaging, and optical and fluorescence imaging. Dr. Glunde has mentored more than 50 students, post- doctoral fellows, and junior faculty and has published over 100 publications in the field of cancer metabolism and molecular imaging of cancer. She has received many competitive grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and frequently serves on NIH study sections and grant review panels of other funding agencies. Dr. Glunde founded the AIMS Core in 2019, making available highly multiplexed, high throughput mass spectrometry imaging technology to faculty at Johns Hopkins and outside institutions. She has built a quickly expanding mass spectrometry imaging program at Johns Hopkins, where her team interacts with a diverse group of over 55 users, spanning multiple departments at Johns Hopkins and several institutions nationwide.

Dr. Cillero-Pastor studied molecular biology and biochemistry at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. In 2009 she obtained her PhD at the INIBIC Institute of La Coruna (cum laude) after having been awarded a fellowship from the Carlos III Health Institute (Spain) to study the effect of pro-inflammatory cytokines in diseased cartilage by proteomics. In 2010 and after having obtained an Angeles Alvarino fellowship, she moved to Amsterdam to work as postdoctoral researcher at Ron Heeren´s lab, AMOLF. In that period, she developed new mass spectrometry imaging approaches in the field of orthopaedics. In 2015 she joined Maastricht University as CORE lab leader at the division of Imaging Mass Spectrometry (M4i). Since then, she has established her own research line on the application of mass spectrometry imaging and proteomics for different biomedical applications with special focus on cardiovascular research and musculoskeletal diseases. She has received funding from NWO and Horizon 2020, including several European ITN grants.

She is principal investigator at the MERLN institute, Maastricht University, since March 2022. Her group develops new spatial omics approaches to understand cell-biomaterial interactions, local drug delivery, biofilm formation, and molecular mechanisms of cell differentiation.

If you are a new researcher, wondering how to be successful in receiving grants from sources such as National Institutes of Health (NIH) or Marie Curie- ITN , join us for this session with experienced panelists. It will be interesting to hear the grant writing stories
from two people working in two different parts of the world.

The session will provide resources and insights on finding grant applications, hot topics to write on, quantity v/s quality of grants, general advice and much more.

My research focuses on developing multimodal chemical instrumentation from a chemometric perspective, improving high spatial resolution mass spectrometry imaging capabilities, and applying semi-targeted complex mixture analysis methodologies. I'm interested in the development of new chemical imaging instrumentation because I see an increasing need for imaging instruments that produce high quality data that can can be easily interpreted by clinicians and applied scientists. To that end, I am working to build multimodal instruments, develop experiment methodologies, and create data analysis pipelines that are able to produce higher-quality chemical information more rapidly and with fewer steps than existing imaging instruments and workflows.

Most mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is performed one pixel at a time at a rate below 1,000 pixels per second. Recently, researchers at the M4i institute at Maastricht University developed an MSI technique called fast mass microscopy [1] which acquires many mass spectra in parallel and is capable of imaging at over 1 million pixels per second. This improvement of >1,000 times imaging speed opens new opportunities for MSI in clinical applications as experiments that would otherwise take months can now be done in less than an hour. This seminar will focus on fast mass microscopy and strategies for its future clinical translation.

[1] Körber, A., et al. Anal. Chem. 2022 94 (42) 14652-8