Kiessling wins glycobiology award

Laura L. Kiessling, a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received the 2025 Karl Meyer Lectureship Award by the Society for Glycobiology. The award is named for Meyer, a pioneering biochemist whose work helped establish glycosaminoglycan research and laid the foundation for modern glycobiology. She received the award at the Society for Glycobiology’s annual meeting in November.

Laura L. Kiessling

Kiessling’s research bridges chemistry and biology to study how carbohydrate structures on cell surfaces, or glycans, mediate processes including cellular recognition, immune responses and host–microbe interactions. Her laboratory pioneered synthetic and polymer-based approaches that mimic the multivalent presentation of glycans at cell membranes, allowing researchers to systematically control glycan density, spacing and composition. These tools enable new experimental strategies to interrogate protein–glycan interactions, which are often transient, weak or highly context-dependent and therefore difficult to access using conventional biochemical methods.

She has won many awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Award, the American Chemical Society Gibbs Medal, and Elsevier’s Tetrahedron Prize. Kiessling is an ACS fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. She also served as the founding editor-in-chief of the journal ACS Chemical Biology, which earned the Award for Innovation in Journal Publishing from the American Publishing Association. In addition, Kiessling has trained more than 100 graduate students and postdoctoral scholars during her career.