Igor A. Kaltashov received his undergraduate degree in physics at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1989, where he carried out his thesis work under the guidance of Prof. G.V. Karachevtsev on gas phase ion-molecular processes in sulfur hexafluoride/air mixtures. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1996, where he worked on applications of mass spectrometry to problems in biochemistry under the guidance of Prof. Catherine Fenselau. Following two years as a post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Medical School (with Prof. Robert J. Cotter), he became a Director of the newly created Mass Spectrometry Center at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1997. He was appointed an Assistant Professor in Chemistry at UMass-Amherst in 2000 and promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2006, and to Full Professor in 2011. His teaching portfolio at UMass includes both undergraduate (Quantitative Chemical Analysis and Instrumental Analysis) and graduate courses (Biological Mass Spectrometry, Applied Analytical Chemistry and Spectroanalytical Chemistry).
Prof. Kaltashov’s research program is focused on developing mass spectrometry-based experimental techniques to study structure, conformation, dynamics and interactions of biopolymers. His group actively collaborates with several biopharmaceutical companies, including Biogen, Pfizer, and Shire. Prof. Kaltashov co-authored over a hundred papers and book chapters and guest-edited a number of special issues for a variety of journals, most recently “Mass spectrometry-based methods to study macromolecular higher order structure and interactions” (Methods, Elsevier). He co-authored (with his long-time collaborator, Dr. Stephen J. Eyles) a monograph “Mass spectrometry in biophysics: Conformation and dynamics of Biomolecules,” whose second edition was published in 2012. Working together with two of his former PhD students, Dr. Shunhai Wang of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Prof. Guanbo Wang of Peking University, he recently finished another monograph, “Mass spectrometry in the analysis of biopharmaceuticals: current state-of-the-art and emerging trends,” which was published in December 2021.