Torsten Kleffmann is director of the Otago Centre for Protein Research at the University of Otago, New Zealand, a facility for biological mass spectrometry with the main focus on proteomics. He is working in the area of proteomics and biological mass spectrometry for more than 15 years and his current interest and research is focused on the dynamics of the protein cargo associated with different lipoprotein particles in the context of cardiovascular disease. After completing his PhD, which he received from the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, he moved to Switzerland to work as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Wihelm Gruissem in the Group of Plant Biotechnology at the ETH in Zurich. Here he undertook some of the early research on proteome dynamics during plant plastid differentiation. He then moved to New Zealand in 2006 to take on his current position at the University of Otago where he has established the current capabilities for biological mass spectrometry in Centre for Protein Research. Besides his work on the protein composition of lipoproteins in general and lipoprotein(a) in particular, he is involved in various other research projects that focus on mass spectrometry-based proteomics on different biological and biomedical systems.