Adding a little sugar: What glycomics can bring to the clinic
As part of our Monday seminar series, we are delighted to welcome our speaker:
Talk title: Adding a little sugar: What glycomics can bring to the clinic
Lara K. Mahal PhD
Professor, Department of Chemistry
Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics, University of Alberta
Hosted By
How to join
The event will be in person only, no need to register.
MSB 2172
Medical Sciences Building
University of Toronto
1 King’s College Circle
Toronto, ON M5S 1A8
If you have any questions about this event, please contact Debb Yorke at lmp.chairadmin@utoronto.ca.
Speaker: Lara K. Mahal PhD
Lara K. Mahal is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics, a Professor of Chemistry and the Director of the Glycomics Institute of Alberta (GIA) at the University of Alberta. An expert in glycomics and chemical glycobiology, she developed lectin microarray technology, which provides a high-throughput method for glycomics now widely applied to understand systems from clinical cancer research to host-pathogen interactions. More recently, her work on microRNA regulation of glycosylation is overturning dogma on how these non-coding RNA work. She obtained her Ph.D. in Chemistry at UC Berkeley (2000) as the first student of Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi (Nobel Laureate, 2022). She was a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. James Rothman (Nobel Laureate, 2013) at Sloan-Kettering Institute from 2000-2003. She started her first independent position as an Assistant Professor in Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. Post-tenure in 2009, Professor Mahal moved to New York University, where she was faculty member from 2009-2019. In September 2019, she joined the faculty of the University of Alberta as the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics. In 2022, she founded the Glycomics Institute of Alberta. She has published >100 papers and received numerous awards including the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Fellowship (2004), NSF Career Award (2007), Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2008), National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award (2008), the Horace Isbell Award for Carbohydrate Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (2017) and the ASTech Award in Medical Research (2024).
