The Work Inside the Bleiholder Laboratory: An Interview with Christian Bleiholder

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 Ron Hites Award (1). The award, named after Ron Hites, who served as the president of ASMS from 1988 to 1990, is given each year for an exemplary paper published in the previous volumes of the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, which he founded in 1988. The award was meant to honor Hites’ notable contributions to ASMS. This year, the Ron Hites Award was given to Christian Bleiholder of Florida State University.

Christian Bleiholder is an associate professor at Florida State University, holding this position since 2019 (2). He received his master’s degree in science from the University of Heidelberg in 2004, received his PhD from the German Cancer Research Center in 2007, and earned his postdoctoral degree from the University of California in Santa Barbara, California, in 2013. His research, which involves mass spectrometry, specializes in structural biology and computational chemistry (3). With this award, he, along with his co-authors (Fanny C. Liu, Mark E. Ridgeway, Christopher A. Wootton, Alina Theisen, Erin M. Panczyk, Florian Meier and Melvin A. Park) are being honored for their paper, “Top-Down Protein Analysis by Tandem-Trapped Ion Mobility Spectrometry/Mass Spectrometry (Tandem-TIMS/MS) Coupled with Ultraviolet Photodissociation (UVPD) and Parallel Accumulation/Serial Fragmentation (PASEF) MS/MS Analysis" (1).

Recently, we sat down with Bleiholder to learn about his storied career and how he got to where he is now. In the second part of our interview, he discusses what his team at the Bleiholder Laboratory is currently working on.

Please stay tuned for more videos from our time with Bleiholder! If interested in hearing from other ASMS 2025 award winners, we also have interviews with other winners, including Vilmos Kertesz and Michael Shortreed!

References

(1) Ron Hites Award. American Society for Mass Spectrometry 2025. https://www.asms.org/about-asms-awards/ron-hites-award (accessed 2025-5-14)

(2) Lab Members. Florida State University Bleiholder Laboratory 2025. https://www.chem.fsu.edu/~bleiholder/about-us/ (accessed 2025-5-14)

(3) Dr. Christian Bleiholder, Associate Professor. FSU Chemistry & Biochemistry 2025. https://www.chem.fsu.edu/person/dr-christian-bleiholder/ (accessed 2025-5-14)