Sarah E. O’Connor is an associate professor of Chemistry at MIT. Her research efforts focus on understanding how nature enzymatically constructs complex natural products, and how these metabolic pathways can be used to produce novel compounds. She received her BS degree in Chemistry from the University of Chicago and her PhD from Barbara Imperiali working at both Caltech and MIT. She was an Irving S. Sigal post-doctoral fellow with Chris Walsh at Harvard Medical School. She joined the faculty at MIT in 2003.