Research Areas

Nicole Strittmatter (*1987) is a mass spectrometry expert and in October 2021 joined the Department of Chemistry as professor for Analytical Chemistry. The focus areas of her research are metabolomics/lipidomics, in situ and ambient mass spectrometry methods, mass spectrometry imaging and multimodal, multi-‘omics’ data integration. These technologies are used and developed to advance our understanding of complex biological systems in health and disease settings. In particular, she develops methods to study the macroscopic and microscopic spatial heterogeneity of biofilms in medical, environmental and biotechnological applications as well as preclinical and clinical tissue analysis.

Prof. Strittmatter received her BSc and MSc degrees in Chemistry from the Justus-Liebig-University Gieβen, Germany in 2009 and 2011, respectively. In 2012, she moved to the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London, UK to perform her PhD studies in analytical chemistry. There she developed novel in-situ mass spectrometric methods for the characterization of unicellular organisms such as bacteria, yeasts and cell lines and used DESI mass spectrometry imaging for direct tissue analysis of human cancer specimen.

From 2015-2021, she was Senior Scientist (from 2019 Associate Principal Scientist) in the Mass Spectrometry Imaging group at AstraZeneca in their R&D headquarters in Cambridge, UK where she used DESI and MALDI imaging as well as imaging mass cytometry in studies on drug disposition, drug efficacy and safety applications as well as metabolic model characterization. She was imaging lead to study the distribution of nanomedicine drug delivery systems, predominantly for oncology applications. Since December 2020 she serves as Section Editor Imaging for the Journal of Mass Spectrometry & Advances In The Clinical Lab (JMASCL).