David Vocadlo of SFU Chemistry was presented with the Horace S. Isbell Award at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

The Horace S. Isbell Award, one of the ACS Division of Carbohydrate Chemistry Awards, acknowledges "excellence in and promise of continued quality of contribution to research in carbohydrate chemistry" by a scientist under the age of 45.

Vocadlo joined SFU’s Department of Chemistry in 2004 as a Canada Research Chair in Chemical Glycobiology, and became a full Professor in 2011. He is a Michel Smith Health Research Foundation Scholar and an affiliate of the Brain Research Centre at UBC. He has received the Discovery Accelerator Supplement from NSERC twice, in recognition of the high potential of his research program. In 2010, Vocadlo was named one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 outstanding leaders by the Caldwell Partners. In 2011, he received a two-year $250,000 E.W.R Steacie Memorial Fellowship, one of Canada’s top science and engineering prizes.

Professor Vocadlo is known for innovative research at the junction of carbohydrate chemistry and chemical glycobiology. His overarching aim is to further our understanding of how carbohydrate structures play central roles in health and disease. To address this question he has focused on developing and validating new tools to monitor and manipulate carbohydrate structures within biological systems. To tackle the associated challenges he has assembled a research team that employs diverse methods including chemical synthesis of carbohydrates and oligosaccharides, mass spectrometry, enzymology of carbohydrate processing enzymes, immunochemical methods, and cell biology. His approach draws conceptually from the fields of organic chemistry, molecular biology, structural biology, proteomics, and biophysics.

Dr. Vocadlo is also applying the results of his research program to develop new approaches to combat bacterial pathogens by targeting antibiotic resistance mechanisms and bacterial virulence factors, as well as cancer and neurodegeneration.