Carolyn Bertozzi is the honoree for the 2024 CME STEM Leadership Award for Advancing Diverse Talent presented on August 20, 2024, in Denver.

Professor Carolyn Bertozzi’s research spans chemistry and biology focused on cell surface glycosylation in cancer, inflammation, tuberculosis and COVID-19. She is the inventor of a class of chemical reactions compatible with living systems that enable molecular imaging and drug targeting. For the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2022.  She has been elected to the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley with postdoctoral work at UC San Francisco. A Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 2000, she went to Stanford University in June 2015. She is now the Baker Family Director of Stanford ChEM-H. Actively engaged with several biotechnology start-ups, Dr. Bertozzi cofounded Redwood Bioscience, Enable Biosciences, Palleon Pharmaceuticals, InterVenn Bio, OliLux Bio, Grace Science LLC and Lycia Therapeutics. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of Lilly.

2024 CME NASA Symposium Abstract

Many human diseases involve dysregulation of mucin glycoprotein expression, glycosylation and localization. These “mucinopathies” include genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis, inflammatory conditions, viral and bacterial infections, and cancer. This presentation will focus on our work to develop tools for profiling mucin expression and glycosylation, discoveries regarding their disease-related biological functions, and finally, new approaches to drug mucins via targeted degradation.