Nikolai Slavov’s group seeks principles in the coordination among protein synthesis, metabolism, cell growth and differentiation. The Slavov group has pioneered multiplexed mass-spectrometry methods for quantifying proteins in single cells and is developing new computational methods for analyzing and understanding single-cell proteomics and multimodal data. The group obtained direct evidence for a new regulatory mechanism of protein synthesis (ribosome specialization) and continues to drive research in this emerging field supported by the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. Dr. Slavov studied biology and physics at MIT before completing a dissertation at Princeton University (Botstein laboratory) with research focused on the coordination among metabolism, growth and gene expression. He then returned to MIT (van Oudenaarden laboratory) for post-doctoral research that characterized trade-offs of aerobic glycolysis.