She is well known for lectin microarray technology and has received numerous awards for her work. These include the NIH Directorʼs New Innovator Award, NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Foundation Fellowship and Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Fellowship. Professor Mahal graduated with highest honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz (B.A.). She then went to the University of California at Berkeley to earn her Ph.D. and moved to New York City as a Jane Coffins Child Postdoctoral Fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Research Center. She began her academic career at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003, was tenured in 2009 and moved to the new Biomedical Chemistry Institute in the Chemistry Department at NYU in 2009 to pursue her interests in collaborative biomedical research involving glycans.