Announcing the retirement of faculty member Robert Cole, Ph.D.
Dr. Robert Cole (aka Bob), Associate Professor of Biological Chemistry, best known as the founding Director of the Johns Hopkins Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Facility in 2000, will retire in March 2025. Under his scientific leadership, this Core served over 400 research labs throughout Hopkins, spanning the Schools of Medicine, Public Health, and Arts & Sciences, and labs at other institutions both nationwide and international. By customizing proteomics services to the needs of over 100 different labs each year, for 25 years, Bob and his team were instrumental in helping Hopkins investigators win over $300 million in extramural funding, including six major Center grants in Cardiology (NHLBI), Gastroenterology (NIDDK), International Health (Gates Foundation), Neurology (NIMH), Medicine (NCATS) and Oncology (NCI), for each of which he directed the Proteomics resources, including Co-Directing the innovative Mass Spectrometry Molecular Imaging and Multi-Omics Core of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. He also chaired many local and national scientific meetings and served on multiple external review bodies.
Bob’s early and collaborative research focused on protein post-translational modifications that control biological pathways. As a postdoctoral fellow with Jerry Hart, he mapped novel sites of O-GlcNAc modifications on synaptic, endocrine and plant proteins. He was the first to demonstrate O-GlcNAc transferase (OGT) and O-GlcNAc deglycosidase (OGA) activity in nerve terminals, and co-authored many of the methods used to analyze O-GlcNAc modifications. He conceived and designed the BEMAD method, still used today to detect and quantify this elusive but essential modification. Bob’s group also pinpointed key posttranslational modifications on biomedically important proteins such as Keap1, HIF1, Huntingtin and CaMKII, in many cases developing innovative and highly sensitive methods to identify the modifications. He also creatively applied mass spectrometry in the service of public health. With his collaborators in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Bob’s group helped define the plasma ‘nutriproteome’ used to evaluate nutritional status in Nepalese children, and, most recently, developed a novel assay to detect, map and quantify hundreds of chemical modifications (‘adducts’) on Human Serum Albumin, as potential biomarkers of personal exposure to many types of pollution. This adductome assay is generally applicable to other proteins and modifications, and may improve our understanding of human health and disease risk.
In addition to his 163 publications, Bob is an outstanding contributor to our educational mission, teaching graduate students, medical students, and countless investigators in the fundamentals of protein biochemistry and mass spectrometry. We will miss his dedication to team science, Lutheran sensibility and incisive humor, and wish him the best on his next adventures.
The Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Facility will be renamed the Center for Proteomics Discovery and operated through the Institute for Cell Engineering, with Chan-Hyun Na, Ph.D., as its new director.