Theodore Alexandrov received a PhD in mathematics in Russia in 2007, did his postdoc at the University of Bremen, Germany, where he became a group leader at the Center for Industrial Mathematics and the head of MALDI Imaging Lab. Since 2010, he is a visiting researcher at University of California San Diego. Since 2012, he is a co-founder and the scientific director of the company SCiLS. Since 2014, he is a team leader at European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg with a research program on spatial metabolomics. The Alexandrov team at EMBL develops novel tools of computational biology that reveal spatial organization of metabolic processes by exploiting high-throughput metabolic imaging and by translating the generated big data into biological knowledge.