President's Innovator AwardThe Society for Glycobiology President’s Innovator Award acknowledges the contributions of one scientist each year who has made a significant impact on society. 2026 Award Recipients
Nissi Varki, MD Drs. Ajit and Nissi Varki are jointly recognized with the 2026 President’s Innovator Award. Ajit Varki is a Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Cellular & Molecular Medicine and Medicine at the University of California San Diego. He earned his medical degree at Christian Medical College, Vellore, before training in Internal Medicine, at the University of Nebraska, and then Hematology, and Oncology at the Washington University School of Medicine, where a postdoctoral fellowship with Stuart Kornfeld set the course of his career in Glycobiology. Ajit Varki's laboratory has spent four decades defining the biology of sialic acids and their roles in health, disease, and human evolution. He co-discovered and named the Siglec family of sialic acid-binding immune receptors, and his identification of the human CMAH pseudogene provided the first known genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees - the loss of the ability to synthesize the sialic acid Neu5Gc. That finding opened a research program linking dietary Neu5Gc incorporation to chronic inflammation and cancer risk, work that has reshaped how the field thinks about human-specific glycobiology and disease susceptibility. Beyond the bench, Varki has been an institution-builder and a repeat innovator in scientific publishing. As founding editor of Essentials of Glycobiology, he created the first major open-access biomedical textbook, freely available through the NCBI Bookshelf.
As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Clinical Investigation (1992–1997), he made it the first major biomedical journal freely available online, years ahead of the broader open-access movement. He is founding director of UCSD's Glycobiology Research and Training Center and founding co-director of the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA), a joint UCSD–Salk Institute program applying comparative and evolutionary approaches to human origins.
His contributions have been recognized with the Society for Glycobiology's Karl Meyer Award (2005) and Rosalind Kornfeld Award for Lifetime Achievement (2020), the International Glycoconjugate Organization Award (2007), the Herbert Tabor Research Award, and election to the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served as President of both the Society for Glycobiology and the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
With the 2026 President's Innovator Award, the Society recognizes a career defined as much by what Ajit Varki built, with open scientific infrastructure, training centers, and entire lines of inquiry, as by his unique scientific discoveries.
Nissi Varki is a Professor of Pathology at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, where she directs the Histopathology/Mouse Phenotyping Division of the Comparative Phenotyping Core. She earned her medical degree at Christian Medical College, Vellore, India, trained in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology with residencies at Creighton University and in St. Louis, and completed postdoctoral fellowships in tumor immunology at Washington University in St. Louis and the Research Institute of Scripps Clinic. She served as Assistant Professor in Residence in UCLA's Department of Pathology before joining UC San Diego in 1985.
Dr. Nissi Varki' s initial research, funded by the National Cancer Institute, was the study of cancer metastasis using athymic mouse models, and generating and using monoclonal antibodies in lung cancer. She played key roles in characterizing antibodies against tumor-associated gangliosides, which are now being used to treat childhood neuroblastomas. Her background and expertise thus led her to direct the activities of at least four histopathology core laboratories at UC San Diego, allowing the analysis of genetically engineered mouse models of human disease, and foray into comparative pathology. She used innovative techniques to upgrade standard immunohistochemical and histological methods, which allowed the detection and the mapping of various glycans and glycan-binding proteins.
Some of these studies were done in collaboration with Ajit Varki, and a few with other scientists and glycobiologists who needed the detailed histopathological expertise. She teaches histology and pathology to first- and second-year medical students and has guided numerous undergraduate students on their path to health care careers. She maintains the website: mousepheno.ucsd.edu which was created based on the lectures in the elective course she started at UC San Diego: "Practical Histopathology in Mouse Models of Human Disease." For three decades, she has also served on the School of Medicine's Recruitment and Admissions Executive Committee.
With the 2026 President's Innovator Award, shared with Ajit Varki, the Society for Glycobiology recognizes a career built as much on infrastructure and innovative methods, as on discovery: the accessible core facilities, and ready consultation with detection tools, made the continuation of individualized glycobiology research possible.
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Ajit Varki, MDLatest News
