Ruixuan Gao
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Chemistry·Early-career
Mass spectrometry imaging maps where molecules sit inside a tissue slice by weighing them directly, with no added dyes or labels. It can track natural lipids, proteins, metabolites and sugars in intact biological and clinical samples.
- Fields
Chemistry
Biomedical Engineering
Biochemistry
- Topics
mass spectrometry imaging
expansion microscopy
label-free imaging
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Develop a tissue polymerization and expansion pipeline that anchors natural lipids to a swellable polymer gel, allowing MALDI mass spectrometry imaging of lipids at subcellular resolution on conventional instruments.
- Extend the expansion pipeline to detect and image lipids and proteins together in the same sample, adapting the gel embedding and digestion steps for multiplexed MALDI analysis.
- Push the spatial resolution of existing MALDI imaging from tens of micrometers to a few micrometers or finer by physically expanding samples, without modifying instrument hardware.
More about the research
But one of the most widely used versions, MALDI imaging, can only see details about tens of micrometers across on a standard instrument. That is too coarse to examine single cells or the structures inside them. Expansion microscopy offers a workaround in light microscopy. It physically swells a sample in a gel so that small features spread apart and can be seen on an ordinary microscope. However, current expansion methods do not work with mass spectrometry.
Why it matters
A label-free way to map molecules inside cells could let ordinary mass spectrometry labs study subcellular anatomy and disease in tissue and clinical samples. It would work without new instruments. It could also support measuring many disease markers at once and more precise disease diagnosis in existing laboratories.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David Muddiman
North Carolina State University, NC·Chemistry
Develop new ionization methods, which convert neutral molecules into charged ions for mass spectrometry, and characterize how they work using real biological tissues rather than standards.
Hao Chen
New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ·Chemistry
Develop a "bottom-up" mass spectrometry imaging method that identifies tissue proteins from their peptide fragments rather than as intact proteins, aiming to identify far more proteins per imaging experiment.
Drew Jones
New York University, NY·Biochemistry
Provide metabolomics services to cancer researchers, including global and untargeted metabolomics, lipidomics, mass spectrometry imaging and custom targeted methods for measuring specific metabolites.
The school
University of Illinois Chicago: 42 labs on PI Pages, $532M a year on research, 359 research doctorates a year.
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