Jurgen Cox PhD

Dr. Jurgen Cox has been associated with the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences as Adjunct Professor in Proteomics since 2013. Dr. Cox will in this role provide advice regarding research projects and strategies at the NNF Center for Protein Research across all programs, in particular the proteomics and disease systems biology programs.

A world leading authority on computational proteomics, Jurgen Cox is best known as the creator of the MaxQuant suite of computational proteomics algorithms and software programs, which have revolutionized the field of quantitative, high resolution proteomics. As has happened in biological fields many times before, Dr. Cox was originally trained as a theoretical physicist. He obtained his master's degree from the University of Aachen (RWTH). He worked on computational modeling in statistical and particle field theory, for his PhD degree, which he obtained from the Mas­sachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US, in 2001. His work involved optimization of quantum mechanical calculations, which for the first time allowed the simulation of classes of quantum mechanical spin models relevant for the physics of quark gluon plasmas.

In 2006, he joined the department of Proteomics and Signal Transduction at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (headed by Professor Matthias Mann), where he is currently a tenured group leader. At the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry he performed ground-breaking research in computational pro­ teomics, which has changed the entire field. Specifically, he developed MaxQuant, an innovative and comprehensive set of algorithms that enable highly precise analysis of proteomics data in an automated and statistically rigorous way. MaxQuant has become the gold standard in the field of high resolution, quantitative proteomics and the original paper describing the software has become one of the most highly cited papers in the field. Cur­ rently, Dr. Cox's research is developing into the direction of data driven systems biology - specifically using deep proteome and post-translational modification data. Despite changing fields his h-index is already over 30 with a total of over 3000 citations.