About Ben Orsburn

The author of this blog has been applying mass spectrometry to riddles in biology for a really long time. First with clinical chemistry, then a PhD centered on glycopeptides before moving into the much less stressful worlds of messenger RNA, proteins and metabolites. 

For more professional information I invite you to this recently realized dream: 

www.orsburnlab.org where I'm trying to keep up with what our little team is doing since I ended up in charge of it in late 2022.  Google Scholar thinks that we've preprinted or published over 20 papers in the first year, but that can't be right. There are only 4 of us...

I'm the chair of the US HUPO Virtual Media Outreach Group. I'm proud to be part of this team as we trying to make cutting edge proteomics technology more approachable. More information on US HUPO and VMO can be found here: https://www.ushupo.org/Committees

Part of the VMO work is helping Dr. Benjamin Neely and I find guests for THE Proteomics Show Podcast series. 

I'm also the Manager/Director of the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences Mass Spectrometry Shared Instrument Facility. This facility is enabled by a collaboration with Agilent. In this facility students have walkup access to an Agilent QQQ system (after training and sign off, of course) and soon a big awesome Agilent QTOF. To date we've trained over 25 users. Nearly all of these are graduate students who are leaving the oldest Pharmacology program in the United States and going into high paying industry positions. Take a guess what mass spectrometers they're buying when they get there? The ones they know how to use? You betcha. Really smart thinking by our previous department chair (and current FDA Chief Scientist, Dr. Namandje Bumpus) and some forward thinking people at Agilent. 

I'm also the Director of the JHU Metabolomics Core Facility in the Institute for Translational Medicine! Watch out for some upcoming papers, I blog mostly about proteomics, but Metabolomics has been the star of a lot of my recent work. There is honestly a metabolomics blog out there that has been in works for 5 or 6 years. The author might also be me. 

This blog is a symptom of an obsession with the power of mass spectrometry and the belief that these technologies, when used to their potential, will make the world a better place.

Some useful links: 

www.LCMSmethods.org

ABRF Workflow Interest Network Panel. Honestly, I should probably take this down, but we had a great run as a team. 

The Orsburn Lab Github. This isn't just the code that we've made, it's also other people's code that I use and you should too.

If you'd like to reach me, the best way is to place a comment on the blog post of interest, or send me a direct email:  orsburn@vt.edu

Fair warning, though: If I appear enthusiastic about this stuff in these blog posts, you haven't seen me wound up in person. I love this stuff. 

I'm also noisy as @ProteomicsNews on Twitter and try to help answer questions on r/proteomics.