Rate My Professor Zach Armstrong

Zachary Armstrong, known as Zach Armstrong, is an Assistant Professor in the Leiden Institute of Chemistry within the Faculty of Science at Leiden University. He obtained his B.Sc. in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of British Columbia in 2009. In 2018, he completed his PhD at the same university, with a thesis titled “Harnessing natural diversity for the discovery of glycoside hydrolases and design of new glycosynthases,” supervised by Professors Steven G. Withers and Stephen J. Hallam. Supported by awards including the NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship and UBC Four Year Doctoral Fellowship, his doctoral research focused on identifying new glycoside hydrolases from metagenomes and designing biocatalysts for glycan synthesis. From 2018 to 2021, he served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the York Structural Biology Laboratory, University of York, England. Since 2021, he has been an Assistant Professor in the Bio-Organic Synthesis division at Leiden Institute of Chemistry, where he leads a research group as a member of the Biosynthetic Chemistry division and the Leiden Glycoscience Centre.

Armstrong's research interests center on biocatalysts that promote the synthesis and degradation of carbohydrates, spanning chemistry and biology. His work emphasizes structural biology of carbohydrate-modifying enzymes, development of tools such as activity-based probes for profiling these enzymes, and their application in discovering new therapeutics targeting disease states and host-pathogen interactions. With 29 publications, over 900 citations, and an h-index of 15, notable contributions include “Cryo-EM structures of human fucosidase FucA1 reveal insight into substrate recognition and catalysis” (Structure, 2022), “Mechanism-based heparanase inhibitors reduce cancer metastasis in vivo” (PNAS, 2022), “Manno-epi-cyclophellitols Enable Activity-Based Protein Profiling of Human α-Mannosidases and Discovery of New Golgi Mannosidase II Inhibitors” (JACS, 2020), “Structure and function of Bs164 β-mannosidase from Bacteroides salyersiae” (JBC, 2020), and “Metagenomics Reveals Functional Specialization and Novel Polysaccharide Utilization Loci in the Castor canadensis Fecal Microbiome” (ISME Journal, 2018). He received the NWO Veni Fellowship in 2022 (280,000 euros over three years) for designing molecules to inhibit viral sugar modifications as a new class of antivirals, and in 2025, Open Competition Science-M funding for tracking mucus-munching bacteria. Additional early-career honors include the NSERC CREATE Fellowship and Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation Excellence Award. His contributions advance chemical biology, biocatalysis, functional metagenomics, and therapeutic development against glycan-related pathologies.