(l-r): Drs. Cristina Magi-Galluzzi, Pamela Stanley and Girish MelkaniThe UAB Department of Pathology welcomed a world-renowned expert on glycobiology, Pamela Stanley, Ph.D., Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Chair, Professor of Cell Biology, Albert Einstein School of Medicine, to present the ninth annual John Jay Listinsky Lecture in Glycobiology. The lecture, "Glycans Required for Reproduction" was presented on Thursday, November 7, 2024, in the Margaret Cameron Spain Auditorium.

Stanley earned her Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne, Australia, for work on influenza virus. She was a postdoctoral fellow of the Medical Research Council of Canada in the laboratory of Dr. Louis Siminovitch in the Department of Medical Genetics at the University of Toronto. Stanley was recruited to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York in 1977 and became a professor in 1986. She has served as the Horace W. Goldstein Foundation Chair since 2007. 

Throughout her career, Stanley has directed a T32 training grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, served as Program Director of the Membrane Group and Associate Director for Laboratory Research in the National Cancer Institute's designated Albert Einstein Cancer Center. Over the course of her tenure, Stanley has received two teaching awards and mentored 14 graduate students and more than 50 postdoctoral fellows. 

Stanley's laboratory developed a battery of glycosylation mutants of CHO cells which have been used by many labs to define functions for mammalian glycans. Her lab cloned the first gene encoding a GlcNAc-transferase and was first to knock out that gene in a mouse model. Subsequently, many mouse mutants defective in glycosylation were generated and used by the Stanley lab to define roles for glycans in development, cancer, Notch signaling and reproduction.

Stanley is a recipient of the Marshall Horwitz Faculty Research Prize from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the Karl Meyer Award of the Society for Glycobiology, the International Glycoconjugate Award of the International Glycoconjugate Association and the MERIT Award from the National Cancer Institute. She served as president of the Society for Glycobiology in 1997 and  is an editor and lead author of 8 chapters in the textbook “Essentials of Glycobiology." Stanley is associate editor of Glycobiology and FASEB BioAdvances, on the editorial board of Scientific Reports, and has published more than 200 papers and invited reviews.

Dr. John Jay Listinsky, an adjunct associate professor at UAB at the time of his untimely death in 2012, originally trained as a diagnostic radiologist but had a decades-long interest in fucosylated molecules and their overlapping physiologic properties. He collaborated with investigators in the Division of Anatomic Pathology for many years, which generated a number of novel manuscripts adding important data to the knowledge base of glycobiology. To further this work, his family, friends and colleagues, spearheaded by his wife Cathy, a UAB pathologist, endowed this lectureship for future generations.