The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) has honored Dr. David Weigt's work on cell-based mass spectrometry assays with the Tony B. Academic Travel Award, enabling him to present his research at the SLAS 2019 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. At the European Mass Spectrometry Conference in 2018, Dr. Weigt had already been voted the best young scientist of the conference by young French mass spectrometers* and was awarded a conference lecture. His most important work, carried out together with the company GlaxoSmithKline, USA, was recently published in the highly renowned journal "Cell Chemical Biology".

Dr. Weigt was an employee of the interfaculty research center CeMOS (Center of Mass Spectrometry and Optical Spectroscopy) at Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, which is headed by Prof. Dr. Carsten Hopf and Prof. Dr. Matthias Rädle. Since August 2019 he has been an employee of Boehringer Ingelheim. The doctorate was carried out in cooperation with the University of Heidelberg (supervised by Prof. Hopf University) as part of the BMBF-funded NANOKAT II research and doctoral college. "David Weigt was an enrichment for the doctoral program, which brought together doctoral students at the universities of Darmstadt and Mannheim as well as the KIT and the universities of Marburg and Darmstadt," said Prof. Matthias Mack, the initiator and scientific director of NANOKAT II, pleased.

In close cooperation with Bruker Daltonics, Dr. Weigt has succeeded for the first time in developing automated drug test procedures in human cancer cells using very fast mass spectrometry as a screening method. The new method avoids autofluorescence, fluorescence suppression and other phenomena that occur in current methods. In addition, he programmed automated data processing and succeeded in implementing effective laboratory automation in cooperation with his company partner Analytik Jena.

 "I am extremely pleased that we are now able to recruit excellent external doctoral students such as David, who joined CeMOS from the University of Hanover after completing his master's thesis at Stanford University, in addition to our own excellent graduates*," commented Prof. Hopf, head of CeMOS.

His awards underline on the one hand the growing importance of doctorates at Mannheim University of Applied Sciences and on the other hand CeMOS' technological leadership in the field of mass spectrometry. In CeMOS, more than 20 cooperative doctoral procedures are currently carried out and supervised in cooperation with the universities of Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Braunschweig, Leuven/Belgium and Berlin.

Further information:

Prof. Dr. Carsten Hopf

c.hopf@hs-mannheim.de