Walter & Mary Glass Professor of Molecular Biosciences
Professor of Chemistry
Co-Founder, MicroMGx (2016), Integrated Protein Technologies (2015) & Proteinaceous (2008)
Neil L. Kelleher, PhD is the Walter and Mary Glass Professor of Molecular Biosciences and professor of chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He also is director of the Proteomics Center of Excellence and a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. His research is focused in the areas of top down proteomics, natural products discovery, and cancer biology. Dr. Kelleher has been successful in driving both technology development and applications of very high performance mass spectrometry. He has over 320 publications, with an H-factor of 70. One example of his impact on technology is ProSight software, now used by over 1800 labs around the world.
Dr. Kelleher’s research has focused on combining proteomics and metabolomics in innovative ways to provide a deterministic platform to feed compounds from the natural world into pharmaceutical pipelines. Over the past decade, he has led the discovery projects for over two dozen new natural products and their biosynthetic gene clusters. Recently, Kelleher has worked with other co-founders of MicroMGx to expand new scalable approaches to discover thousands of natural products from soil bacteria and fungi (i.e., metabologenomics). He has ushered the creation and maturation of the leading search engine ProSight for top-down proteomics and proteoform analysis. Beyond establishing two successful biotech ventures over the last decade, Kelleher also serves as the founding president of the Consortium for Top Down Proteomics (tdprot.org; a 501(c)(3) with global membership currently numbering ~400).
His outstanding contributions to the fields of proteomics and natural products chemistry have been recognized by multiple awards, including the Biemann Medal from the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society, the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, a Packard Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER Award.