Dr. Lara K. Mahal is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. She is also a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Alberta. She is notable both for her pioneering work establishing lectin microarrays as a new technology for glycomics, her work on miRNA regulation of glycosylation and her graduate work with Professor Carolyn R. Bertozzi on unnatural carbohydrate incorporation. Work in her laboratory focuses on understanding the role of carbohydrates in human health using systems- and chemical biology-based approaches