Sarah OConnor joined the faculty of UEA in 2011, where she is also a Project Leader at the John Innes Centre. She performed her graduate work at both Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was an Irving Sigal post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. After her post-doctoral work, she became assistant and then associate professor of Chemistry at MIT. Her work has been recognized by several awards, including an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship, the American Chemical Society Pfizer Award and the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

Anti-cancer agents such as vinblastine and taxol, the analgesic morphine, and the anti-malarials artemisinin and quinine are each natural products that are produced by a plant. Despite the importance of these compounds, it is unclear how many of these complicated molecules are made by the plant. Our group elucidates and engineers the metabolic pathways that construct these compounds from simple building blocks. An understanding of these pathways allows us to harness the wealth of compounds and biocatalysts that plants have provided. Moreover, we can also begin to speculate how and why plants evolved to produce some of these molecules.