Researching with Undergraduate Mass Spectrometrists: An Interview with ASMS Award Winner Emma Guiberson

Every year at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) conference, awards are presented to honor veteran and newcomer researchers making notable contributions in the field of mass spectrometry (MS). One such award is the Research at PUI Award. Given out annually and fully funded by Agilent Technologies, the award promotes academic research in MS by faculty members and their students at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) (1). This year's award went to Emma Guiberson of Middlebury College.

Emma Guiberson is an assistant professor at Middlebury College. She earned her bachelor's degree in chemistry and philosophy at the University of Notre Dam, her PhD in chemistry at Vanderbilt University, and became a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. She currently teaches courses in biochemistry, pursuing research at the intersection of microbiology and analytical chemistry (2). Currently, her research laboratory is focused on using MS to understand the molecular mechanisms of dental caries and gum disease.

Recently, we sat down with Guiberson to learn about her career and how she got to where she is now. Here, we discuss her current research efforts, what and who guided her to where she is today, and what advice she has for the next generation of mass spectrometrists.

Congratulations on receiving the Research at PUI Award. What does receiving this honor mean to you personally and professionally?

It's a huge honor, especially as someone who hasn't always been the most traditional of a mass spectrometrist. I've definitely flirted with the interdisciplinary aspects of applying mass spectrometry (MS), but I really appreciate the community, especially considering that I've been going to ASMS nearly every year since I started graduate school. I deeply appreciate the community and having people to talk about MS with, and the acknowledgement of my work in the field is a huge benefit. I’m someone who doesn't necessarily publish or present at the same degree that people at research universities do, and being acknowledged in that capacity is also a huge benefit and something I'm really excited about. The funding definitely doesn't hurt either, especially in these trying times, and thinking about how to sustain this research with undergraduates moving forward, making sure that we can do everything that we set out to do but maybe have a slower time scale to get it done. So, it means a lot to be acknowledged as a member of the community and to have the additional support to keep my research going.

Can you talk about the work that your laboratory does in using MS to understand the microbial-derived molecular mechanisms of dental caries and gum disease? Are there other projects that your laboratory is working on?

My research has always been pretty interdisciplinary, especially with microbiology type topics, I'm really interested in how microbes and hosts interact with each other through a molecular lens. I'm really excited now about turning some of these applications and approaches to the oral microbiome, which is not necessarily the field I was trained in. I was trained more in the gut microbiome space, so I'm excited to apply it to this other region in part because there's so much research right now in microbial derived metabolites. There's incredible work coming out all over the country and the world about the gut microbiome, which is obviously an important topic. I'm excited to gain a better understanding of the molecular drivers of some of these oral diseases with the big picture goal of eventually improving diagnostics compared to things like costly X-rays that we currently use. That way, we can better address the needs in low-income communities.

We're coming at this question from a variety of angles, using both approaches with and without MS. For instance, we're first trying to figure out what's actually in the media that we're growing our bacteria in as a kind of base starting point, and we're also using cell culture models of gingival cells to better understand periodontal disease and specifically looking at what types of metabolites are driving this inflammatory response. So far, it has been an interesting interdisciplinary approach to ask some of these questions with MS as our bread-and-butter approach. I just wrapped up my first year here, so we've still got lots going on and lots more to evolve as students join the laboratory and have varying interests. I'm really fortunate that I had some incredibly talented students to help with these projects moving forward. I’m excited to see how we get there.

What are you looking forward to the most about the ASMS Conference in Baltimore?

Although I love working at a PUI—you know, it's a dream job—it is a challenging shift going from working in MS core facilities as a graduate student. I worked really closely with the MS core during my postdoc, and I was always surrounded by other phenomenal mass spectrometrists that I could bounce ideas off of and troubleshoot with when things went awry. By nature of being at a smaller, undergraduate-focused institution, I'm essentially the only mass spectrometrist here. We have incredible support staff that are really fantastic to work with, but it is a little bit different becoming the sole authority on MS. And so, I've generated a bunch of questions over the past year of things that I've run into and challenges that I've had using our instrumentation here and thinking about some of these problems that we're anticipating working on with undergraduates.

I'm really excited to go to ASMS and be surrounded by all of these experts that know more than me about mass specand can help me troubleshoot these different approaches, give me some feedback, and talk through some of these problems at a higher level. It's been a great growth experience to get there and be that sole voice of MS on campus, but I'm really looking forward to talking to others that love this field as much as I do, without necessarily having to explain to them first what the field is. My undergraduates are awesome, and they've really learned a lot about MS over the past year, but they only know how much I can train them to do, and so I'm excited to talk to others in the field again, as well as connecting with friends and collaborators that I've made throughout the years in the field and at ASMS.

What do you find most fulfilling about working with and introducing undergraduate students to mass spectrometry?

My students are absolutely the best part, seeing their excitement and eagerness to keep learning new things every day. Even what seems like the most boring or mundane to us is a great source of excitement for them every day, and that brings me such great joy. I think it's a good reminder of the excitement that we had for science at their age. Although I think everyone who's been in academia for a while still shares that love of science, it may have dulled a little bit over time because it becomes the routine in your day-to-day job. And so, it's really nice to remind me of my love for science every day through my students. I really enjoy being reminded again about the joy of learning how to do science and learning how to do research.

They also have a ton of questions. They're new to this field, so they can end up asking questions that you don't necessarily think about when you're getting into your graduate school and postdoc work. And so, they've given me opportunity to grow a lot as a scientist myself just by having to address all these questions that I hadn't thought about in years, or explain why things are the case that you just take for granted. That being said, MS with undergraduates is also challenging, but it makes it rewarding, because essentially, to the students, you have this black box that feels so complicated, and everything that you can change in your method seems so new to them. I am able to explain that to them, and that way, they're able to appreciate and respect but not fear the complexity of MS. And when they're able to sit down and run an experiment on their own and be able to interpret what the output is telling you, it's really the best part of my day, especially when they start designing their own experiments and they start becoming more independent over time. As a result, you start to see that shift from student to researcher right in front of you, and it's just incredibly rewarding. And I don't think I'll ever get sick of it.

Were there any key mentors who shaped your early career and how the how did their guidance influence your path?

Yeah, I love the opportunity to talk about the fantastic and phenomenal mentors that I've had throughout my academic career, many of whom are still part of my life today. I had a bit of a unique graduate school setup because of the interdisciplinary nature of my project, and I ended up having three different mentors that all served as advisors. So, I had lots of advice, lots of mentorship, and lots of advising. In particular, I had Richard Caprioli and Jeff Spraggins in the MS space, and then Eric Skaar on the microbiology side, as well as my postdoc advisor, Justin Sonnenberg, who was also in microbiology. I would say this multi-area mentorship style, while not for everyone, was great for me because it gave me so many different perspectives to look at my research. I got to approach some of these questions that came up from a lot of different perspectives because I had a lot of different viewpoints to lean on and to learn from.

In particular, I’d like to give a huge shoutout to one of my graduate advisors, Jeff Spraggins, who was and continues to be a fantastic mentor and friend to me, and he wrote a letter in support of this award, which I'm very appreciative of. He comes at research from kind of a different perspective and asks these big, important questions. I really enjoyed thinking about how we can ask these big questions with MS and how we can use that to improve the health of others. Jeff really showed me that aspect, while also showing me how to balance my work and my life, which I'm extremely appreciative of. The long collaboration that has existed before my time, even between these three different mentors is what shaped my interest in the microbiology, MS interface, and the interesting biological questions that I could ask in this area, while still encouraging and allowing me to go down some rabbit holes where I needed to learn some new approaches to answer the questions that we were generating.

Learning how to do cell culture in my last semester of graduate school was important because I really wanted to understand the specific mechanism by which we were seeing some of the changes that we saw. So, I really appreciate my mentors’ patience in letting me go off on quite a few side quests to get to the questions that I was interested in. And obviously with the support that they've given me since graduating, as well through helping me find postdocs, supporting different grants and fellowships that I wrote, reading through my faculty application materials, and celebrating my wins with me. I knew that I wanted to go into the PUI world early on in my career. Depending on the mentors that you end up with, this mindset isn't always supported at the level I would like it to be, and I was fortunate that my bosses were on board early on. They supported me in seeking out teaching opportunities and other types of opportunities to help me see more what that PUI world would look like and to stay competitive in that space, recognizing that research could be my top priority without necessarily being my only priority. And so, I really appreciated them supporting me down this path that maybe looks different and showing me that I could still do cool research and be successful and be engaged while dedicating a lot of time to teaching undergraduates.

I'm really thankful for that support early on and supporting the path that I chose, even if it wasn't necessarily the exact one that everyone wants for their graduate students.

What advice would you offer to the next generation of analytical scientists as they begin their careers?

This one's weird, because I'm sure, like everyone else, I feel like I just started my career. But I would say my advice would be twofold. One would be to not let the techniques that you know hold you back from the questions you ask. Again, I was in a unique position with having three different advisors, so I could learn a variety of techniques, and that allowed me to see a wide variety of science and answer different questions, because I had these different backgrounds and these different skill sets. I think it only strengthened me as a scientist and my passion for science because I could answer questions that maybe someone with only one of my backgrounds wouldn’t have been able to do. So, follow those questions as far as you can, and do not just stop because you don't necessarily have the tools. I was fortunate that I had advisors that supported that, but I think that was foundational in my love of science continuing to grow.

Another piece of advice that I'm sure I've heard from many people as well through my career is that the people in your corner are so important. Not just while you're in school or in your postdoc but moving forward in your career. Try and surround yourself with people that authentically celebrate you and your accomplishments while still challenging you to grow. You can always switch your main area of research. As scientists, I think we can learn to love a lot of areas of science. You cannot change your advisors last-minute, and so keeping that in mind and thinking about people that are going to support and celebrate you, is just as important as the science when you're trying to figure out your next steps at each step of the pathway.

If you would like to hear more from other ASMS award winners, we have done interview series with Vilmos Kertesz, Michael Shortreed, and Christian Bleiholder! Stay tuned to hear more from other ASMS 2025 awardees.

References

(1) Research at PUIs Award. American Society for Mass Spectrometry 2025. https://www.asms.org/about-asms-awards/research-at-puis-award (accessed 2025-5-15)

(2) Emma Guiberson. Middlebury College 2025. https://www.middlebury.edu/college/people/emma-guiberson (accessed 2025-5-15)