Congratulations to Steffen Neumann! The bioinformatician has recently been elected Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society. The honorary membership is awarded as the highest honor of the society for an outstanding lifetime achievement in the field of metabolomics. Steffen Neumann received the award for his commitment to the introduction of computer-assisted metabolomics analyses and for initiating the CASMI competition (Critical Assessment of Small Molecule Identification), an international meeting of metabolomics experts that has been taking place since 2012 to jointly advance the development of software and workflows for metabolite identification. The jury also honored his commitment to foster open access to metabolomics data. The IPB is the first German research institute to host an honorary fellow of the metabolomics society.
Steffen Neumann studied computer and natural sciences at the University of Bielefeld, where he also completed his dissertation on the modelling of protein-protein docking. Since 2005, he has headed the Bioinformatics and Mass Spectrometry research group at the IPB, where he and his team develop computer-aided metabolomics analyses. He is teaching at the Institute of Computer Science of the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Since 2023, the bioinformatician has been one of the spokespersons for the Program Center MetaCom at the IPB, where he leads the research group Computational Plant Biochemistry.
However, his commitment to improving the storage and usability of scientific data goes far beyond the boundaries of the institute and culminates in a wide range of activities in international consortia. In 2008, the IPB became the first European member to join the MassBank consortium, an open library for mass spectra that is enormously important for plant research and the development of in-silico methods for metabolite identification. From 2014 to 2018, he was a board member of the Metabolomics Society. Since 2017, he has been a member of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), where he has been on the Strategy Advisory Board since 2019. Since 2020, he has been heading the IPB section of the chemistry consortium NFDI4Chem, which is part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) initiative of the Gemeinsame Wissenschaftskonferenz (Joint Science Conference).
In 2018, he received the "highly cited scientist" award from the analysis company Clarivate Analytics in the category “cross field”, making him one of the 6,000 most cited experts in the last ten years.
Steffen Neumann passes on his passion for data to numerous young scientists and STEM students who gain their first experience in the field of bioinformatics at the BioByte Summer School, which is regularly organized by MLU, the IPK and the IPB.
The honorary membership was awarded on the 17th of June at the official annual meeting of the Metabolomics Society and the world's largest metabolomics conference in Osaka (Japan). At the next Metabolomics Conference in Prague in June 2025, Steffen Neumann will be invited to give a plenary lecture. Congratulations!