Chris Overall
Professor Chris Overall is a Distinguished University Scholar of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, a Canada Research Chair Laureate in Protease Proteomics and Systems Biology, a Yonsei Distinguished Scholar of Yonsei University, Korea, and was a Senior Fellow of the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, Germany, where he is now an Honorary Professor.
Dr. Overall completed his undergraduate and Master’s degrees at the University of Adelaide, Australia; his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Toronto; and was an MRC Centennial Fellow in his postdoctoral training with Dr. Michael Smith, Nobel Laureate, UBC, after which he launched his lab at UBC in 1993. On sabbatical in 1997 – 1998, he was a Senior Scientist at British Biotech Pharmaceuticals, Oxford, UK, and in 2004 and 2008, a Senior Scientist at the Expert Protease Platform, Centre for Proteomic Drug Discovery, Novartis Pharma, Basel, Switzerland.
He is a highly cited scientist with 316 publications, including 36 high-impact papers in Nature (2), Science (2), Cell and their daughter journals (32), most as senior PI, generating an h-index = 108 from > 42,000 citations. He is best known for developing terminomic proteomics methodology. One application is the experimental identification of original, mature and neo-protein termini generated after proteolysis. He has applied these techniques to reveal new roles for proteases in inflammation, immunity and inflammatory diseases, and most recently in the COVID-19 pandemic, where he has mechanistically investigated the roles of SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro in cleaving >300 host cell substrates.
His peers elected Dr. Overall to organize and chair the premier conferences in his field, including the 2003 Matrix Metalloproteinase and 2010 Protease Gordon Research Conferences, and in 2017, he co-chaired the International Proteolysis Society Biannual Meeting. He holds influential roles on the executive of >10 international committees, the most prominent of which was election to the Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) Executive Council and as Chair of the HUPO Chromosome-centric Human Proteome Project (C-HPP). In 2022, he was invited to represent UBC at the G7 Research Summit on One Health. He has received numerous recognitions, e.g., election to the Royal Society of Canada, appointment as a Yonsei Distinguished Scholar (Yonsei University, 2023) and a Distinguished University Scholar of UBC in 2024. He received the UBC 2006 Killam Faculty Research Prize; the 2002 Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Researcher of the Year; the Helmholtz Award (2008); International Proteolysis Society Lifetime Achievement Award (2011); Matrix Biology Society of Australia and New Zealand Barry Preston Award (2012); and the IADR Distinguished Scientist Award (2013). His advances in proteomics have been recognized by the Canadian National Proteomics Network Tony Pawson Award (2014); the Proteomass Scientific Society Award (2017); the 2018 Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) Discovery Award in Proteomics Sciences; and the 2022 Helmut Holzer Award. He is a Councilor of the pi-Hub Global Proteomics Project, Guangzhou, China (2023 –).