Dr. Schnaar (left) with Dr. Girish Melkani, lecture organizerby Hannah Buckelew
The UAB Department of Pathology welcomed a world-renowned expert on glycobiology Ronald L. Schnaar, Ph.D., John Jacob Abel Professor and Interim Director, Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, to present the eighth annual John Jay Listinksy Lecture in Glycobiology. The lecture, “Glycan Recognition in Human Immune Regulation- a Special Role for Sialic Acid” was presented on Thursday, October 26, 2023, in the West Pavilion Conference Center.
Schnaar earned his undergraduate degree in Cellular Biology from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He completed postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins and a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) before joining Johns Hopkins as faculty in 1979. Schnaar has served as President of the Society for Glycobiology, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Glycobiology, board member of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and director of the Pharmacology Graduate Program at Johns Hopkins.
Schnaar studies glycans and glycan-binding proteins as therapeutic targets in inflammatory diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, and ganglioside functions in the brain. His work has been recognized with various honors, including the Karl Meyer Award from the Society of Glycobiology and the Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Dr. John Jay Listinsky, an adjunct associate professor at UAB at the time of his untimely death in 2012, originally trained as a diagnostic radiologist but had a decades-long interest in fucosylated molecules and their overlapping physiologic properties. He collaborated with investigators in the Division of Anatomic Pathology for many years, which generated a number of novel manuscripts adding important data to the knowledge base of glycobiology. To further this work, his family, friends and colleagues, spearheaded by his wife Cathy, a UAB pathologist, endowed this lectureship for future generations.