| Jennifer Prescher | |
| Birth Name: | Jennifer Ann Prescher |
| Workplaces: | Stanford University University of California, Irvine |
| Alma Mater: | University of Wisconsin–La Crosse (BS) University of California, Berkeley (PhD) |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Carolyn Bertozzi |
| Fields: | Chemistry |
| Thesis Title: | Probing glycosylation in living animals with bioorthogonal chemistries |
| Thesis Url: | https://worldcat.org/en/title/892833679 |
| Thesis Year: | 2006 |
| Prizes: | National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2014) Sloan Research Fellowship (2015) |
Jennifer Ann Prescher is an American chemist who is a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. Her research considers the development of bioorthogonal, bioluminescent tools for the noninvasive, real-time imaging of immunometabolism. She was recognized with the 2023 American Chemical Society Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award.[1]
Prescher was an undergraduate in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. She moved to California as a doctoral researcher, and was appointed to the University of California, Berkeley as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute predoctoral fellow, where she worked with Carolyn Bertozzi on glycosylation. She developed a strategy to visualize the glycosylation process, which allowed for the design and development of novel diagnostics. The strategy relied upon the use of bioorthogonal chemistries. Specifically, she showed that it was possible to incorporate metabolic precursor sugars with specific chemical functionalities into target glycans. For example, biologically inert azides can be incorporated into glycans and chemically modified with exogenously delivered probes.[2]
In 2008, she joined Stanford University as a Susan Komen postdoctoral fellow. Prescher joined the University of California, Irvine in 2010, and was made a full professor in 2018. Her early work looked to design imaging techniques to better understand cell movements and metastatic disease.[3] She worked on bioluminescent tools; tools which luminesce when they come into close proximity to cancer cells.[4] [5] She called the technique a biological flashlight, or phasor.[6]