Lara Mahal

Dr. Lara K. Mahal is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at New York University. She is notable both for her pioneering work establishing lectin microarrays as a new technology for glycomics and for her graduate work with Professor Carolyn R. Bertozzi on unnatural carbohydrate incorporation. Work in her laboratory focuses on understanding the role of carbohydrates in signaling and on using systems-based approaches to decode the role of glycosylation in cell differentiation and pathogenesis.^[1]

Academia

Professor Mahal received her B.A. in Chemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1995. As an undergraduate, she worked on organic free radical chemistry in the laboratory of Professor Rebecca Braslau. In 1995, Professor Mahal joined the newly formed laboratory of Professor Bertozzi at the University of California, Berkeley where she worked on the incorporation of unnatural functionalized sialic acid derivatives onto the surface of cells. For this landmark work, Professor Mahal was awarded and American Chemical Society Medicinal Chemistry Pre-doctoral Fellowship. After graduating in 2001, Professor Mahal did postdoctoral research on neuronal exocytosis in the laboratory of Professor Jim Rothman at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center. During this time Professor Mahal was a Jane Coffins Child Cancer Research Fellow.

In 2003, Professor Mahal joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry. As an Assistant Professor, she has received several major awards, including the Beckman Young Investigators Award (2004),^[2] an NSF Career Award (2007), the Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2008) and the 2008 NIH Director's New Innovator Award.^[3]

References

External links

• University of Texas Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry