Sarah O'Connor

Sarah E. O'Connor is an American molecular biologist known for her research on the molecular machinery involved in assembling plant natural products such as vinblastine, morphine, iridoids, and secologanin. She has made significant contributions to understanding how changing the enzymes involved in this pathway can lead to the production of diverse analogs. O'Connor served as a Project Leader at the John Innes Centre in the UK from 2011 to 2019 before being appointed by the Max Planck Society to head the Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany in 2019. She earned her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School. O'Connor has also served as a professor at MIT from 2003 to 2010.