Ten Feizi's Biography

Ten Feizi, Professor/Director, Imperial College London

Professor Ten Feizi, is director of the Glycosciences Laboratory at Imperial College London. She graduated in medicine at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School in London in 1961. Her research career has included periods at Rockefeller University and Columbia Medical Center New York. In 1973 she returned to London and was appointed to the Medical Research Council’s Clinical Research Centre. There she established a research group focused on Glycobiology. This group has become one of the leading centers in the field, and since 1996 it became the Glycosciences Laboratory of Imperial College. Ten Feizi is recognized as a pioneer in the biology of carbohydrates. Her publications (more than 300 to date), are highly cited. Among them is an article in Nature 1985, which is an ISI citation classic in Glycobiology. In that article, Ten Feizi predicted important biological roles for carbohydrate chains of glycoproteins and glycolipids. In 1985 Ten Feizi introduced the neoglycolipid (NGL) technology for design of oligosaccharide probes from glycoproteins for micro scale detection and structural characterization of the ligands of carbohydrate-binding proteins. Many of these receptors have important roles in molecular mechanisms of infection, inflammation and host defense. In 2002 Ten Feizi and her colleagues introduced the first microarray system for sequence-defined oligosaccharides based on the NGL principle and intended to encompass entire glycomes i.e. the carbohydrate repertoires of whole organisms This is currently one of the two most comprehensive carbohydrate microarray systems in the world and it is the most diverse on account of its high content of natural oligosaccharide sequences that are difficult to synthesize. Among the honors and awards that Ten Feizi has received is the Outstanding Research Award of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists and a Career Achievement Award of the Glycobiology Group of the British Biochemical Society in 2002. She is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences.