Prof. Dr. Michael W. Linscheid

Vice president for research at the Humboldt University of Berlin

Michael W. Linscheid was born in Wuppertal in 1948. He studied chemistry at the University of Cologne, and afterwards took his doctoral degree there writing his thesis about “Field Desorption Mass Spectrometry of Nucleic Acid Components”.

In 1980 he went to Berkley, University of California, as a research chemist. One year later, he was appointed head of the organic chemistry group at the ISAS (Institute for Analytical Sciences) in Dortmund. He passed some time as visiting researcher in the US and Japan, and earned his habilitation at University of Cologne.

In 1998 he became professor for Analytical and Environmental Chemistry at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Since 1998 he is member of the DFG’s (German Research Foundation) Committee on Scientific Instrumentation, since 2001 reviewer for Analytical Chemistry, and since 2004 speaker of the review board “Analytical Chemistry and Method Development”. He was chairman of the “Mass Spectrometry Working Group”. In 2005 he was awarded the DGMS’ (German Association for Mass Spectrometry) Applied Biosystems Life Science Prize for his outstanding research in mass spectrometry in the biosciences.

From 2002 to 2004 he was dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences I at the Humboldt-Universität. As interim director he headed the Natural History Museum from 2004 to 2005. Since 2008 he is vice president for research at the Humboldt-Universität. He is married to Dr. Wilma Linscheid and has two children.

His current research topics

Research within his group focuses on further methodical development of quantitative analysis of peptides, proteins and DNA in biological samples especially with separation techniques and high performance mass spectrometry. Special attention is given to chemically modified structures, which are formed by medicines and xenobiotic substances, and are important in chemically induced cancer development and treatment.

The figure shows differences in concentration of proteins of a single spot on a 2D gel: A) silver coloured; B) marked with Tm(III) and C) with Lu(III) and measured with ICPMS. Furthermore, the chemical characterization of bdellovibrio’s cell wall compounds is investigated as well as methodical work carried out about gas phase behaviour of complex biological oligomers.

Contact: Prof. Dr. Michael W. Linscheid, e-mail, tel.: +49 30 2093-2446, www.linscheidlab.de