Professor Chris Overall was awarded the Life Time Achievement Award for Outstanding contributions to the field of Proteolysis by the International Proteolysis Society at its General Meeting in San Diego in October 2011.

This prestigious award, presented at the premier meeting for proteases, recognizes Dr. Overall’s major contributions to the field. Amongst these, he has brought proteomics to the study of proteases by inventing, developing and applying the field of Degradomics.

Degradomics is the application of genomic and proteomic techniques to elucidate protease and protease-substrate repertoires, or ‘degradomes’, on an organism-wide scale. Dr. Overall coined this term and under his leadership, his group continues to pioneer new proteomics techniques to identify cleaved substrates and the downstream effects of proteolysis. His systems biology approach to identify new protease substrates in complex proteomes and in cellular contexts is providing major new insights that are of clinical relevance for understanding mechanisms of disease and for developing novel diagnostic and therapeutic tools.

Dr. Overall is a longstanding member of the Centre for Blood Research, a Professor of Oral Biological and Medical Sciences in the Faculty of Dentistry, an Associate Member of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Faculty of Medicine, and holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Metalloproteinase Proteomics and Systems Biology.