Lab Members

Professor and Vice-Chair of Equity Diversity Inclusion and Climate, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry

Co-Director, Glycobiology Research and Training Center

Executive Secretary and Program Chair, Division of Carbohydrate Chemistry and Chemical Glycobiology of the American Chemical Society

Born and raised in the Czech Republic, Kamil came to the U.S. to pursue his graduate education in chemical synthesis. He received the Alfred Bader Fellowship to pursue his Ph.D. at Columbia University in the laboratory of Prof. Dalibor Sames. His Ph.D. work focused on exploiting the unique reactivities of transition metals to streamline the construction of complex organic compounds with unique biological activities.

As an NIH K99 postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi at UC Berkley and the Molecular Foundry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, his research merged concepts of synthetic chemistry, nanomaterials, and chemical biology to develop new tools to study the interactions and functions of glycans in cancer development and spreading.

Kamil joined UC San Diego in 2013. His research program is aimed at developing chemical methods for engineering the composition and biophysical properties of the glycocalyx of living cells to control their interactions with biochemical cues, signaling and differentiation.