Ben won the HUPO (Human Proteome Organization) 2020 Discovery in Proteomic Sciences Award for contributions in DIA/SWATH mass spectrometry method development to support quantitative proteomics!
Dr. Ben Collins is among the most prominent members of a rapidly growing research community that have transformed DIA from an attractive conceptual curiosity into the robust, benchmarked and widely used technique. Ben’s advances include: • Developing AP-SWATH method to characterize dynamic changes in protein interaction networks. • Co-leading an international consortium of 11 labs that demonstrated high interlab and intralab robustness and reproducibility of DIA data in large cohorts. • Having a leading role in developing robust FDR estimation methods in large datasets acquired by DIA. These are now recognized as standard and prevent, at an early stage of the technology, problems of false positive inflation. • Senior contributor to the development of the SEC-SWATH method to quantify the organization and redistribution of cellular protein complexes in perturbed systems. The improvements in data quality and robustness enabled by DIA are now driving the adoption of proteomic approaches more broadly in life sciences and will continue to do so as further developments are made. Ben has played a major role in this process both from the technology development and application perspectives.