Born in Thuine, Lower Saxony, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Göttingen. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 at Yale University where he worked in the group of John Fenn, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Mann became group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. Later he went back to Odense as a professor of bioinformatics. Since 2005 he has been a director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich. In addition, he became a principal investigator at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research in Copenhagen.

From his research group in Martinsried originated in 2016 PreOmics, a company commercializing sample prep sets, and EVOSEP, a company commercializing protein analysis equipment.^[1]

His work has impact in various fields of mass spectrometry-based proteomics:

• The peptide sequence tag approach developed at the EMBL was one of the first methods for the identification of peptides based on mass spectra and genome data.
• Nano-electrospray (an electrospray technique with very low flow rates) was the first method that allowed femtomole sequencing of proteins from polyacrylamide gels.
• A recently developed metabolic labeling technique called SILAC (stable isotope labeling with amino acids in cell culture) is widely used in quantitative proteomics.

• PharmaFluidics, Member of the Advisory Board (since 2019)^[1]

• Homepage of the Mann department at the MPI of Biochemistry
• Nature article about the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research Denmark launches big push for protein power