Professor Inaugural Lecture

DTU Bioengineering is pleased to invite everyone to the inaugural lecture by Professor Erwin Schoof: Seeing the Invisible: Single-Cell Proteomics and the Hidden Logic of Cell Behaviour.

The lecture is open to all interested and will be followed by a reception.

Registration is not necessary.

Full Abstract

Every tissue is a mosaic of individual cells, each making decisions that determine whether it becomes blood or bone, stays healthy or turns malignant, responds to treatment or resists it. It is this cellular heterogeneity that drives my research. How does a stem cell decide what to become? Why do some cells, healthy and malignant alike, behave so differently from their neighbors? And how can we turn the molecular logic behind these decisions into new therapeutic opportunities?

These decisions are ultimately executed by proteins, yet for decades we have inferred them indirectly, reading the genome and transcriptome while the proteins themselves, the actual machinery of the cell, remained largely invisible at single-cell resolution. In this inaugural lecture, I will describe how my group develops and applies technologies to make the single cell's proteome measurable. By combining mass spectrometry, antibody-based signal amplification, and computational modelling, we can now chart how stem cells differentiate, how that program is corrupted in leukemia and other cancers, and where the vulnerabilities of malignant cells might lie. I will show how method development and biological discovery advance together, each new gain in sensitivity opening questions that were previously unaskable, from mapping early human blood cell differentiation to placing proteins back in their spatial tissue context.

I will close with a perspective on where the field is heading: toward proteomics that is not only single-cell but spatial and translational, integrated with transcriptomics and machine learning, and capable of turning the hidden logic of cellular heterogeneity into diagnostic and therapeutic reality. The tools that let us see the invisible are, increasingly, the tools that will let us act on it and bring insights from the bench closer to the clinic and the patients who stand to benefit.

We look forward to welcoming colleagues, collaborators, and friends to DTU Bioengineering for an inspiring and joyous afternoon.