Josephine Bunch

Josephine Bunch is a fellow at the National Physical Laboratory. She is Chair of Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry at Imperial College London and the Co-Director of the National Centre of Excellence in Mass Spectrometry Imaging.

Bunch completed a PhD sponsored by Pfizer at Sheffield Hallam University in 2005.^[1] Her thesis, "Detection and imaging of pharmaceutical compounds in skin by MALDI-MS", used mass spectrometry.^[2]

Bunch was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield, where she was awarded an Enterprise Fellowship to commercialise imaging using mass spectrometry.^[1] She joined the University of Birmingham, leading a large multi-disciplinary group using MALDI Mass spectrometry.^[3][4] She remains an honorary senior research fellow at the University of Birmingham.^[5] She also holds a Chair in Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry at Imperial College London.^[6]

She joined the National Physical Laboratory in 2013, where she became responsible for research in MALDI metrology.^[4][7] In 2017 Bunch was funded by Cancer Research UK's Grand Challenge to map tumours at a molecular and cellular level.^[8] She came up with the idea when listening to a BBC Radio 4 program about the Cancer Research UK Grand Challenges.^[9] The investment was worth £16 million, and uses mass spectrometry imaging techniques to study breast, bowel and pancreatic tumours in "unprecedented detail.^{[10][11][12][13][14]} She spoke about the project at the Hay Festival and presented their project at the Royal Society Summer Exhibition.^[15][16][17]

She is part of a COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action on mass spectrometry imaging.^[18][3]