Dr Dejan Nikolic is a CASMI veteran who participated in CASMI2013 and 2015 and co-organized CASMI2014. He is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy, College of Pharmacy, University of Illinois at Chicago where he is currently in charge of daily operations of the Analytical Core of the UIC/NIH Center for Botanical Dietary Supplements Research. In his research he uses modern LC-MS and LC-MS-MS approaches to address challenging problems in phytochemical research. His interests include structure elucidation of natural products using mass spectrometry, determination of ADME properties of active plant ingredients as well as development of new assays for drug discovery from plant sources. He is also interested in the development and validation of modern UHPLC MS-MS methods for quantitative analysis of active ingredients both in plant extracts and in clinical specimens in support of Phase I and Phase II clinical trials. He has authored and co-authored more than 90 publications and two book chapters.

Dr. Nir Shahaf works in the department of Plant and Environmental Sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, with the research groups of Prof. Asaph Aharoni and Dr. Assaf Vardi. He has been working on computational methods in plant metabolomics studies during the last five years, partly in collaboration with Foundation Edmund Mach (FMACH) in San Michele all’Adige, Italy. His current work focus is on developing automatic methods for generating mass spectrometry libraries and subsequent automatic non-targeted high-confidence annotation of compounds, based on statistical modelling.

Dr. Emma Schymanski works in the Environmental Chemistry Department at Eawag: The Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. Her main focus is on the identification of non-target (unknown) environmental contaminants, structure generation and candidate selection as part of the work in the SOLUTIONS EU project. She is an active member in the MassBank consortium, developing RMassBank in a team and also works on optimizing compound database search strategies for candidate selection and how to communicate the confidence of high-throughput identification results.

Dr. Steffen Neumann is member of the Metabolomics Society and head of the Bioinformatics and Mass Spectrometry group at the Institute of Plant Biochemistry, which works on several aspects of (plant) metabolomics. Projects in the group cover various stages in the bioinformatics and metabolomics pipeline and include co-maintaining the Bioconductor package XCMS (amongst others), peak annotation with CAMERA, mass spectral fragmentation with MetFrag and also the participation in the MassBank consortium.