John M. Asara, PhD

Dr. Asara is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Director of the Mass Spectrometry Core Facility at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, MA.

He received his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from Michigan State University in 1999 and did postdoctoral work at Harvard University in proteomics before a short stint at a biotechnology company. He then established the mass spectrometry core facility at BIDMC in 2004 with a single used instrument starting with proteomics analysis and has grown the core into a multi-omics facility capable of proteomics, phosphoproteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, stable isotope labeling and flux analysis using state-of-the-art Orbitrap and hybrid triple quadrupole instrumentation.

Dr. Asara has developed methods for label-free quantification of peptides and proteins, in-gel stable isotope labeling as well as cross-species analyses of immunoprecipitation tandem MS data for biomarker discovery. A decade ago, Dr. Asara sequenced collagen peptides from both 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus rex and 80 million year old Brachylophosaurus fossils that preserved soft tissues. He has also developed polarity switching targeted metabolomics methods and untargeted lipidomics platforms from any biological source including 13C/15N metabolic flux platforms.

His current research involves a serial-omics approach by using a single tiny sample of tumor tissue, biological fluid or cell pellet and then performing proteomics, metabolomics and lipidomics and integrating those datasets into a biological model. Dr. Asara has co-authored over 250 peer reviewed manuscripts.