Professor Pieter C. Dorrestein, is the Director, Collaborative Mass Spectrometry Innovation Center and Co-Director, Institute for Metabolomics Medicine. Working at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences UCSD, Pieter uses mass spectrometry to eavesdrop on the molecular conversations between microbes and their world.

The work aims to develop new mass spectrometry based methods to understand the chemistry of microbes, our microbiome and their ecological niche. In short, developing tools that translate the chemical language between cells. This research requires the understanding of (microbial) genomics, proteomics, imaging mass spectrometry, genome mining, enzymology, small molecules structure elucidation, bioactivity screening, antibiotic resistance and an understanding of small molecule structure elucidation methods.