Michael Gross

Dr. Gross is Professor, Department of Chemistry, and Professor, Immunology and Internal Medicine, at Washington University School of Medicine. He is also Principal Investigator, Mass Spectrometry Research Resource at Washington University.

Dr. Gross’s main research goal is to develop biophysical methods that use mass spectrometry to understand proteins, their interfaces, solvent accessibility, affinities of binding, and their folding and unfolding.

He and his team have developed an approach, Fast Oxidation of Proteins (FPOP), for footprinting to map proteins with reactions of OH radicals. A unique application of FPOP is to follow fast protein folding or unfolding. They are also developing new methods using Hydrogen/deuterium Exchange (HDX) to solve problems such as following aggregation of AB, the plaque-forming protein in Alzheimer’s disease. Their work with native electrospray has uncovered that activating the entire complex by electron-capture dissociation (ECD) causes flexible regions of the constituent protein to fragment, which can be captured and measured.

In his collaboration with Protein Metrics, Dr. Gross and his team are using Protein Metrics’ Byonic™, Bylogic ®, Super Novo™, and Intact Mass™ to develop advanced methods for intact mass analysis, PTM analysis, disulfide bond analysis, and Higher Order Structure.

Dr Gross joined Washington University as a professor and Principal Investigator in 1994. Prior to that he was Director of the National Science Foundation Midwest Center for Mass Spectrometry for 16 years. He held a variety of professorship roles in Chemistry at the University of Nebraska, where he was also the 3M Alumni Professor of Chemistry.

He received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Minnesota. He also completed post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania and Purdue University.