The 2023 Molecular and Cellular Proteomics (MCP) / American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) Lectureship Award will be presented to Dr. Max Crispin during this year’s Society for Glycobiology (SFG) Annual meeting in Hawaii. The MCP journal was created in 2001 to address the growing needs of the proteomics community. The MCP/ASBMB award was established in 2013 and has been bestowed upon a single scientist each year who is at the forefront of the emerging fields of glycomics and glycoproteomics.

Dr. Crispin is a Professor of Glycobiology and the Director of the Institute for Life Sciences at the University of Southampton. He also holds an adjunct Professor position at the Scripps Research Institute in California and is a Supernumerary Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. Dr. Crispin did his undergraduate studies at the University of Oxford and completed his doctoral studies working at both The Scripps Research Institute under the direction of Ian Wilson and at the Oxford Glycobiology Institute under the direction of Raymond Dwek and Pauline Rudd. This was followed by post-doctoral work and a climb up the faculty ladder at the University of Oxford and a move to the University of Southampton in 2017. He is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (2016) and Royal Society of Chemistry (2020).

During his independent career, Dr. Crispin has been a pioneer in the use of mass spectrometry to study the glycobiology of viruses and the role of site-specific glycosylation in immunogen design. This has resulted in more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and over 15,000 citations of his work. His independent work has been continuously supported by multiple funding agencies including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the NIH. In addition to Dr. Crispin’s work on viruses, he has made fundamental advancements in using glycosylation to fine-tune effector functions of antibodies, as well as developing novel methods to boost the activity of therapeutic antibodies. A long-term major focus area for Dr. Crispin has been in understanding the glycan shield of HIV. His laboratory pioneered quantitative site-specific analysis of the glycosylation of Env trimers and his procedures currently serve as the standard for assessing the quality of clinical grade materials in the field. Just as importantly, his team has utilized these sophisticated site-specific analyses approaches to guide HIV immunogen design in the hunt for broadly neutralizing antibodies and an effective vaccine. Finally, he has been a leader in the area of glycobiology of emerging viruses including Lassa virus and the SARS-CoV-2. For his long-term commitment to and development of approaches for studying site-specific glycans of viruses using mass spectrometry, Dr. Max Crispin was recommended by the SFG awards committee and chosen by the editorial leadership of the MCP to receive the 2023 MCP Lectureship Award.