Provost earns lifetime achievement award

Karen Colley, UIC provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, has received a lifetime achievement award for her pioneering work in glycobiology, a field that studies how complex sugars attached to proteins and lipids, called glycans, influence biological systems, including cell communication, immune responses and disease processes.

Colley received the Rosalind Kornfeld Award for Lifetime Achievement in Glycobiology during the Society for Glycobiology’s annual meeting Nov. 9-12, in San Diego, California. The award is named for Rosalind Kornfeld, a groundbreaking scientist in glycobiology who directed Colley’s PhD program at Washington University in St. Louis.

“I met Rosalind as a graduate student. An outstanding scientist, advocate for trainees and role model for female scientists, Rosalind guided me and mentored me throughout my time in graduate school and well beyond, into my faculty career,” said Colley, who’s also a biochemistry and molecular genetics professor. “Receiving the Rosalind Kornfeld Award for Lifetime Achievement in Glycobiology is a tremendous honor.”

Colley has worked in glycobiology since discovering the field as an undergraduate at Duke University.

“Glycobiology found me,” she said. “I was looking to gain research experience, and I ended up in a glycobiology lab and never left the field.”

Colley earned her chemistry degree at Duke University and went on to complete a PhD in biochemistry at Washington University. She continued her training in cell and molecular biology as a National Institutes of Health-funded postdoctoral fellow at UCLA before joining the University of Illinois Chicago in 1991.

“I did my PhD training, postdoctoral fellowship and faculty research in different areas in the glycobiology field,” Colley said. “There are lots of questions to answer, and many scientists are put off by the complexity of glycans.

“As a result, those that do engage find a lot of great research paths to pursue and a very inclusive and supportive community. This community has nurtured me for over 40 years, and it has been a pleasure to give back in society leadership positions and in mentoring the next generation of glycobiologists.”

For more than 25 years, NIH supported Colley’s research in glycobiology. Her research focused on figuring out how cells add sugar molecules to proteins, a process that affects how those proteins work and interact.

Colley is a leader in the field, serving as president of the Society for Glycobiology, chairing major conferences, guiding NIH review panels and lending her expertise as a reviewer and editorial board member for several journals. She’s also the editor-in-chief of the journal Glycobiology.

At UIC, Colley has held positions such as associate dean for research, associate dean for graduate research and education in the College of Medicine and dean of the Graduate College. She has served as provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs since 2023.