Professor Laura Kiessling

Professor Laura Kiessling
Department of Chemistry
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Revealing Glycan Interactions in Health and Disease

The glycans that coat the surfaces of cells can change in health and disease. While many studies have demonstrated these changes in diseases ranging from cancer to inflammation to infection, the impact of these alterations on immune recognition is poorly understood. Deepening our understanding of how glycosylation is controlled and how cell-surface glycan recognition impacts immune responses could lead to new therapeutic approaches that influence immunity or tolerance. We are leveraging our knowledge of human proteins that recognize glycans and nucleic acid amplification strategies to generate new tools that can provide insight into how glycans shape immunity. This seminar will describe the application of these tools to elucidate the consequences of altered glycosylation in the context of infection and cancer. We anticipate that this approach can be used to identify novel strategies for combating diverse diseases.

Laura Kiessling

Laura Kiessling earned a BS in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Yale University. After two years at the California Institute of Technology as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow, she joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1991. In 2017, she returned to MIT as the Novartis Professor of Chemistry and Member of the Broad Institute. She is also a Member of the Koch Institute and an Associate Member of the Ragon Institute. Her interdisciplinary research interests have advanced our understanding of cell surface recognition processes, especially those involving protein-glycan interactions. Laura is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Member of the American Academy of Microbiology, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine. She was the founding Editor–In-Chief of ACS Chemical Biology. Her honors and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the ACS Gibbs Medal, the Tetrahedron Prize, the Centenary Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry.

Hosted by Professor Erin Carlson and Professor Theresa Reineke