Lara K. Mahal is currently the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics at the University of Alberta.  An expert in glycomics and systems-based approaches to understand glycan regulation and function, she developed lectin microarray technology. This technology provides a high-throughput method for glycomics that is now widely applied to understand systems from clinical cancer research to host-pathogen interactions. She is also known for her work on microRNA regulation of glycosylation.  As an undergraduate, Professor Mahal was a University of California Regents Scholar, graduating with Highest Honors and a B.A in Chemistry from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in 1995.  She obtained her Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley (2000) with Professor Carolyn Bertozzi. She was a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor James Rothman at Sloan-Kettering Institute (2000-2003), before starting 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 CERC in Glycomics.  For her work she has 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).