Currently, Petra Van Damme holds a Professorship (senior lecturer) at Ghent University. She obtained her Master’s degree in Biochemistry in 2001 and obtained her PhD in Biomedical Sciences in 2008. Her doctoral research was oriented in the field of gel-free proteomics and focused on the development of a repertoire of proteome-analytical methods for the identification and characterization of proteins by the isolation of proteome-representative peptides, including amino and carboxy-terminal peptides. Since the isolation of N-termini inherently led to the discovery and further analysis of protein N-termini and their specific modifications, her research focus diverged from the study of proteolysis to the study of protein N-terminal protein modifications and more recently, the application of proteogenomics strategies to map the translation initiation landscape in bacteria and eukaryotes. Her recent discoveries relate to the existence of N-terminal proteoforms and improving the genome annotation of bacterial pathogens such as Salmonella.