Speaker Biographies
Theodore Alexandrov is a team leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), the Europeâs leading life science laboratory. He is also the head of the EMBL Metabolomics Core Facility and a faculty of the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit between EMBL and Heidelberg University. The Alexandrov team at EMBL aims to reveal the secrets of metabolism in time and space in tissues and single cells by developing experimental and computational methods. The team unites interdisciplinary scientists from biology, chemistry, and computer science as well as software engineers. Since 2014, the team develops and provides for free the cloud software METASPACE for metabolite ID in imaging mass spectrometry, which is used by universities, governmental organizations, and pharma companies. Their second major development is the method SpaceM for spatial single-cell metabolomics which integrates imaging mass spectrometry and microscopy. The method was developed in the prestigious ERC Consolidator project, was demonstrated to resolve cell type and cell states, and highlighted by Nature Methods in their technology feature on the emerging field of single-cell metabolomics. The work of Alexandrov team is funded by various other European, national, NIH, and industrially-funded projects and led to has over 95 journal publications and 6 patents in the field of spatial and single-cell -omics. In the past, Theodore Alexandrov has co-founded and scientifically directed the company SCiLS on software for imaging mass spectrometry. In 2022, he is launching a BioStudio startup-in-making project at the Bioinnovation Institute in Copenhagen aimed at commercialization of spatial single-cell metabolomics for drug discovery and personalized medicine.
