Sarah O’Connor

Sarah O'Connor is an American natural product chemist specializing in plant biochemistry. Her research focuses on understanding the enzymatic mechanisms underlying the biosynthesis of important medicinal compounds, including vinblastine and morphine, and how variations in these pathways generate diverse molecular variants. She served as Project Leader at the John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom from 2011 to 2019 before being appointed by the Max Planck Society to establish and direct the Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, a position she assumed in 2019.