Perdita Barran is Chair of Mass Spectrometry in the Department of Chemistry and Director of the Michael Barber Centre for Collaborative Mass Spectrometry which is located in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology. 

Professor Barran holds a Chair of Mass Spectrometry in the Department of Chemistry and is the Director of the Michael Barber Centre for Collaborative Mass Spectrometry at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, The University of Manchester, UK.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and was awarded the Tiden Prize by the RSC in 2025. She also has the RSC Theophilus Redwood Award (2019), Researcher of the Year, University of Manchester (2020) and the ACS Measurement Science Lectureship 2021. In 2020 she initiated the COVID-19 Mass Spectrometry Coalition and was appointed as Chief Advisor to the UK Government on Mass Spectrometry as part of their pandemic response. Perdita has had the privilege to mentor 42 graduate students through the successful completion of their PhD’s. as well as 16 postdoctoral fellows.  Perdita has authored over 200 publications in peer reviewed journals which have been cited over 4000 times, by people other than her.

In 2021 Perdita founded the company Sebomix Ltd. to exploit sebum as a diagnostic biofluid with a focus on Parkinson’s Disease.

Her research interests include: Biological mass spectrometry; Instrument and technique development; Protein structure and interactions; Dynamic and Disordered Systems; Parkinson’s disease Diagnostics; HDX-MS; Proteomics; and Molecular modeling.

The Barran group has considerable experience in gas-phase ion chemistry and the application and development of mass spectrometry for complex chemical and biological problems. We use solvent free methodologies to provide an understanding of structure function relationships of proteins and peptides at the molecular level, and to use this information to further biomedical research. Our work has a particular focus on disordered and dynamic protein systems, weak interactions, and supramolecular systems. We aim to use mass spectrometry to solve problems that cannot be tackled well by other methods, and to translate our findings effectively for societal benefit.

We also have fun doing science!