Presentation

BP4NTA is excited to introduce Dr. Steven (Steve) Watkins as our March speaker! He will give his talk on
“Periodic Table of Foods Initiative (https://foodperiodictable.org/) – developing standardized analytical approaches and centralized data processing to characterize food supplies”
on Tuesday, 3/19/2024, from 12 pm – 1 pm EST.

The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) is building a global ecosystem and providing tools, data, and training to catalog the biomolecular composition of the world’s food supply. We seek to enable data-driven solutions to improve human and planetary health. We have developed standardized analytical approaches and centralized data processing pipelines for untargeted metabolomics, lipidomics, glycomics, and targeted assays for minerals, fatty acids, etc., and we are working to implement these platforms in laboratories around the world.

BP4NTA is excited to introduce Dr. Thomas (Tom) Metz as the first speaker of 2024! He will be giving his talk on “The m/q Initiative at PNNL – advancing tools and methods for reference-free compound identification” on Tuesday 1/16/2024 from 12pm – 1pm EST.

Dr. Metz received a PhD in Chemistry from the University of South Carolina in 2003, then joined Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for post-doctoral work in mass spectrometry with Dr. Richard D. Smith, where he focused on metabolomics. He became Staff Scientist and a Principal Investigator in the Integrative Omics Group in 2005, and from 2015-2023 was the Metabolomics Team Lead for a group of scientists that focuses on development and applications of high-throughput metabolomics and lipidomics methods to various biological questions. From 2021-2023 he was President of the Metabolomics Association of North America. His research has focused primarily on developing and applying mass spectrometry-based omics approaches, including proteomics, in studies of diabetes mellitus and infectious diseases, resulting in over 200 publications to date. Currently, he is a PNNL Laboratory Fellow, the Chief Science Officer for the Biological Sciences Division, and Lead of the PNNL m/q Initiative.