Jessica Stark

Jessica Stark is the Underwood-Prescott Career Development Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she leads the Stark Lab focused on developing new paradigms to harness the immune system. Her research centers on understanding and engineering glycans—sugars that coat the surface of all cells and play critical roles in immune recognition, signaling, and regulation. The lab pioneers biotechnological approaches to identify which glycans control immune responses and to design strategies for targeting them therapeutically. By integrating molecular, synthetic, and systems biology with immunology and biological engineering, her work addresses fundamental questions in immunobiology while advancing next-generation immunotherapies. Research applications span cancer, autoimmunity, and infectious disease, with an emphasis on translating basic discoveries into therapeutic opportunities. In addition to research, she is committed to broadening access to STEM education through mentoring, outreach, and the development of innovative educational tools, including the BioBits® platform for hands-on biology learning. Their research directions are illustrated by key works including "The Orbitofrontal Cortex Is Required for Learned Modulation of Innate Olfactory Behavior", and "Nonlinear limits to the information capacity of optical fibre communications".