STACY A. MALAKER, PH.D.

Principal Investigator

Dr. Malaker obtained her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in Biochemistry and Anthropology-Zoology. During this time, she worked at the Protein Structure Facility, performing peptide synthesis and using mass spectrometry for quality control. She then went on to receive her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Virginia in the laboratory of Professor Donald Hunt. There, her thesis work focused on enrichment and mass spectrometric identification of glycopeptides presented by the MHC class I and II processing pathways. Dr. Malaker continued to investigate the role of aberrant glycosylation in cancer as an NIH postdoctoral fellow in Professor Carolyn Bertozzi’s laboratory at Stanford University. There, she used mass spectrometry and glycobiology to investigate mucinase activity on glycoproteins, with the ultimate goal of characterizing cancer-derived mucins.

Dr. Malaker's expertise in MS instrumentation and data analysis, combined with her experience in chemical biology and glycobiology, gives the Malaker laboratory a unique ability to tackle long-standing challenges associated with glycoproteomics. Her laboratory is focused on establishing methods and technology to study mucins, a class of densely O-glycosylated extracellular proteins, by MS. Additionally, the laboratory studies mucins in a biological context, since these proteins are integral in numerous diseases including cancer, cystic fibrosis, and inflammatory bowel diseases.