Lennart Martens

Lennart Martens is Senior Full Professor of Systems Biology at Ghent University, Group Leader of the Computational Omics and Systems Biology (CompOmics) group at VIB, and Associate Director of the VIB-UGent Center for Medical Biotechnology, all in Ghent, Belgium. He has been working in mass spectrometry-related bioinformatics since his Master’s degree, which focused on the computational interpretation of peptide mass spectra, and the sequence-dependent fragmentation of peptides. He then worked as a software developer and framework architect for a software company for a few years, before returning to Ghent University to pursue a Ph.D. in proteomics and proteomics informatics. During this time, he worked on the development of high-throughput peptide centric proteomics techniques and on bioinformatics tools to support these new approaches. In 2003 he designed and built the PRIDE repository for the global dissemination of proteomics data at EMBL-EBI as a Marie Curie fellow of the European Commission. After obtaining his Ph.D., he rejoined EMBL-EBI to coordinate the newly created PRIDE group for the next three years, firmly establishing the system as the world’s foremost public proteomics data repository. He then moved back to Ghent University and VIB to take up his current positions, focusing on novel machine learning algorithms for mass spectrometry data analysis, and their application to the large-scale orthogonal reprocessing of public proteomics data. Among others, Prof. Martens has been elected to the Young Academy of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences in 2013, to the Human Proteome Organisation (HUPO) Council in 2016, was admitted as Fellow of the Royal Society for Chemistry in 2017, and as Full Member of the Sigma Xi Scientific Honor Society, USA in 2022. He also served as President of the ABRF Proteomics Informatics Research Group (iPRG) in 2011, on the HUPO Executive Board from 2017 to 2019, and as President of the European Proteomics Association (EuPA) from 2021 to 2023. Dr. Martens received the 2014 Prometheus Award for Research Excellence from Ghent University, and the 2015 ‘Juan Pablo Albar’ Proteomics Pioneer Award from the European Proteomics Association (EuPA). An author on over 280 peer-reviewed papers, he has also co-written two Wiley textbooks on computational mass spectrometry.