René Zahedi, MSc, PhD

Dr. Zahedi received a master's degree in biochemistry from the University of Bochum/Germany in 2004 and his PhD from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Wuerzburg/Germany in 2008 for his work on the phosphoproteome of human platelets.

After two years as a postdoctoral fellow, he became an independent junior principal investigator for Signalling Proteomics (2010-2014) and later a permanent senior principal investigator for protein dynamics (2014-2017) at the Leibniz-Institute for Analytical Sciences (ISAS) in Germany.

In 2018, Dr. Zahedi became associate director of the Segal Cancer Proteomics Centre at the Jewish General Hospital of the McGill University in Montreal and an associated member of McGill’s Centre for Translational Research in Cancer.

In 2022, he joined the department of internal medicine as full professor and became the new director of the Manitoba Centre for Proteomics and Systems Biology.

Dr. Zahedi has published over 140 peer-reviewed articles in internationally renowned journals (full list of publications), including Cell, Nature Biotechnology, and Nature Communications, yielding an h-factor of 48.

He has published pioneering work on using quantitative mass spectrometry to characterize human platelets, which are important players in cardiovascular disease and studied the dynamics of platelet activation and inhibition through temporal phosphoproteomics.

He has developed novel and improved methods for the sensitive analysis of post-translational modifications (PTMs) such as protein phosphorylation, proteolytic cleavage/N-terminomics, and redox modifications, as well as the combination thereof to study PTM-crosstalk.

Dr. Zahedi was the head of the Bioanalytics Study Group of the German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM) from 2010-2017 and a Member of the Education Committee of the European Proteomics Association (EuPA) from 2015-2017.

In 2021, he was elected as a member of the board of the Canadian National Proteomics Network (CNPN).

Since 2021, he has served as editor-in-chief for Expert Review of Proteomics.

Education

Postdoctoral fellow, Leibniz-Institute for Analytical Sciences (ISAS), Dortmund, Germany

Postdoctoral fellow, Rudolf-Virchow-Center, DFG Research Center for Experimental Biomedicine, University of Wuerzburg, Germany

PhD in biochemistry, University of Wuerzburg, Germany

Master of science in Biochemistry, University of Bochum, Germany

Bachelor of science, in Biochemistry, University of Bochum, Germany

Awards

Humboldt host, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, 2016-2017

Honorary member, Society for the Advancement of Biomedical and Clinical Research

Biomedicine Science Award, Society for the Advancement of Biomedical and Clinical Research, Dortmund, Germany

Stipend of the University Clinic Wuerzburg, Germany