Professor Ten Feizi is director of the glycosciences laboratory at Imperial College London. She has been a major contributor to the field of carbohydrate biology. Her initial studies established that autoantibodies elicited during Mycoplasma pneumoniae infection are monoclonal and directed to the host cell antigen I and not to the mycoplasma itself. She subsequently discovered that the sialylated I antigen is the host-cell ligand for mycoplasma pneumoniae. She has developed new methods in carbohydrate biochemistry that have led to discoveries of ligands for the selectins, the collectins and the macrophage endocytosis receptor. Her work has provided new insights into mechanisms of structural recognition in innate immunity.