Carsten Hopf obtained his PhD in biochemistry from Tübingen University/Max-Planck-Institute for Developmental Biology. As an EMBO fellow in neuroscience, he then worked at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for three years, before joining Cellzome AG, a proteomics-focused drug discovery platform company in Heidelberg in 2001. There, for 13 years, he served in multiple roles in platform technology, assay development, drug discovery and business development, and eventually as part of Cellzome’s leadership team until 2014. Since 2005, Carsten Hopf is a professor of bioanalytics, proteomics and drug discovery at Mannheim University of Applied Sciences. He currently heads the Center of Mass Spectrometry and Optical Spectroscopy (CeMOS) in Mannheim as well as the M2Aind partnership for innovation in health industry. Carsten Hopf serves on boards of several biomedical clusters and as the industry liaison of the German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He is also an associated professor in the Medical and Biosciences Faculties of Heidelberg University.