Laura L. Kiessling

Laura Lee Kiessling (born 21 September 1960) is an American chemist and the Novartis Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After earning her PhD, Kiessling spent two years at the California Institute of Technology as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow, where she worked with Peter B. Dervan to study DNA recognition and cleavage.

While at UW-Madison, Kiessling also became the director of the Keck Center for Chemical Genomics[6] and the National Institutes of Health Chemistry-Biology Interface Training Program.

She has made contributions to the synthesis and study of many biologically active molecules, including glycosyl donors,[12] modified peptides,[13][14] and glycopolymers.

[24] In 2007, Kiessling was inducted as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences[25] and in 2017, she received the Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Chemistry.

Figure 1. Overview of research in the Kiessling group. (A) Glycopolymers are synthesized by ring-opening metathesis polymerization . (B) Cell signaling can be mediated by protein-carbohydrate binding. (C) Kiessling's research uses synthetic mimics to study and manipulate the recognition and signal transduction pathways.