As an undergraduate, Professor Mahal studied with Professor Rebecca Braslau, working in the area of pro-chiral carbon radical chemistry. She was a University of California Regents Scholar, and graduated 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 with Professor Carolyn Bertozzi at the University of California, Berkeley in 2000. Her work with Professor Bertozzi established the area of metabolic labeling using bio-orthogonal handles, demonstrating that ketones could be incorporated into cell surface sugars, e.g., sialic acids, through metabolic pathways. She was awarded an American Chemical Society (ACS) Predoctoral Medicinal Chemistry Fellowship for this work.

She then moved to New York City where she was a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor James Rothman at Sloan-Kettering Institute (2000-2003) studying the role of synaptotagmin I in calcium-dependent membrane fusion.

In 2003, she started her first independent position as an Assistant Professor in Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. Post-tenure in 2009, Professor Mahal moved to NYU, where she helped found the Biomedical Chemistry Institute. In 2016, she was promoted to Full Professor.

As of Fall 2019, she joins the faculty of the University of Alberta as the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Glycomics.

 

Awards

Goldstein Lectureship in Glycobiology (2021)
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)
Horace Isbell Award for Carbohydrate Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (2017)