David Muddiman
North Carolina State University, NC·Chemistry
Mass spectrometry weighs molecules so they can be identified, and it has shaped our molecular understanding of cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative disease and autoimmune disease. Before a molecule can be weighed it must be converted into a charged particle, a step called ionization.
- Fields
Chemistry
Biomedical Engineering
Biochemistry
- Topics
mass spectrometry
ionization
molecular microscopy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- 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.
- Build three-dimensional molecular images from serial tissue sections and ablation-based imaging, reading out multiple molecule classes such as neurotransmitters, lipids and glycans.
- Apply the new imaging methods to model organisms to gain mechanistic insight into ischemic stroke, wound healing and cardiometabolic disease.
- Document and freely share the hardware, processes and MSiReader software so the methods can be adapted to other mass spectrometry imaging platforms.
More about the research
Better ionization opens the door to more kinds of molecules and to mapping where each one sits inside a tissue. This project develops new ionization methods for biological mass spectrometry, aimed at tissue imaging, sometimes called molecular microscopy.
Why it matters
Mapping molecules directly in tissue could show what changes during stroke, wound repair, and heart and metabolic disease, pointing to new disease mechanisms. Because the instrumentation and the platform-independent MSiReader software will be documented and shared openly, other imaging laboratories could adopt the advances on their own instruments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ruixuan Gao
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Chemistry·Early-career
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.
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
North Carolina State University: 40 labs on PI Pages, $717M a year on research, 603 research doctorates a year.
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