Roland Schauer Award in Glycobiology

The Roland Schauer Award was established in 2025 to recognise an outstanding early-career scientist in glycobiology. The award includes an honorary lecture at a conference organised by the GBM Study Group “Glycobiology” and is endowed with €2,000. This year, the award goes to Dr. Daniel Bojar, Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology and the Wallenberg Centre for Molecular and Translational Medicine at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The award will be presented at the 35^th Joint Glycobiology Meeting in Leiden, the Netherlands (October 25-27, 2026).

Daniel Bojar obtained his PhD in mammalian synthetic biology at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, before pursuing postdoctoral research in computational biology at MIT and Harvard University in the USA. In 2021, he established his own research group at the University of Gothenburg, where he now holds a position as associate professor of bioinformatics at the Wallenberg Centre for Molecular and Translational Medicine and the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology.

Bojar's work focuses on glycans, the sugar chains that coat every cell and that are the most structurally complex molecules in biology. That complexity is why glycans have largely been left out of the computational revolution that transformed the study of proteins and DNA, and his group builds the methods and platforms to change that. These include glycowork, an open-source software platform now used by researchers worldwide, and artificial intelligence models that read glycan structures directly from measurement data, predict how cells assemble them, and predict which glycans a given protein, virus, or bacterium will recognize.

By combining computational approaches with experimental research, including the characterisation of a substantial proportion of known human milk oligosaccharides, Bojar’s work enables researchers to investigate on a large scale how glycan structure determines biological function. This opens up new opportunities for applications in diagnostics and the development of novel therapies.