Prelog Lecture 2024

It is with great pleasure that the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry of ETH Zurich awards the 2024 Prelog Medal and Lectureship to Professor Dr. Sarah E. O’Connor in recognition of her outstanding research on the chemistry and biochemistry of plant natural products, with special emphasis on the detailed elucidation of metabolic pathways and engineering of novel routes and compounds for biomedical applications.

Professor O’Connor was born in 1973 and received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago. In 2001, she earned her Ph.D. from doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Barbara Imperiali, investigating the effect of glycosylation on the structure and function of proteins. Following postdoctoral work as an ACS Irving S. Sigal fellow on nonribosomal-peptide-polyketide natural products with Christopher Walsh at Harvard Medical School, Sarah O’Connor began her independent career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003. In 2011, she moved to the John Innes Centre in Norwich with a joint appointment at the University of East Anglia.

Since 2019, Sarah O’Connor has been Director at the Max Planck Institute of Chemical Ecology at Jena and has held an honorary professorship at the University of Jena since 2022.

Professor O’Connor has made groundbreaking contributions to the chemistry and biochemistry of natural products produced by plants. Her many and diverse contributions have had a profound influence on our understanding of how plants produce complex natural products. The elucidation of the biosynthesis of strychnine, to cite only one recent example, was a signal achievement. This work solved the long-standing question of how plants create this complex alkaloid that has intrigued scientists for decades.

Profesor O’Connor does not stop at the rigorous elucidation of biosynthetic pathways and structures of complex plant natural products but uses the mechanistic understanding to engineer novel metabolic pathways. In a seminal study, she succeeded, for example, in integrating carbon-halogen bond formation into the metabolism of the medicinal plant Catharanthus roseus, the Madagascar periwinkle. The diversity of natural product analogs and their production on a large scale attest to the practical use of her research for biomedical applications. A hallmark of Sarah O’Connor’s research is her rigorous and mechanistically driven approach to problem-solving and her view of relevant applications.

Professor O’Connor is much-recognized for her exceptional achievements. Among other major distinctions, she has received the ACS Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry (2011), the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2011), the Wain Medal (2013), the Perkin Prize for Organic Chemistry from the Royal Society of Chemistry (2019), the ACS Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products (2022), and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Preis (2023) of the German Chemical Society. Sarah O’Connor is a member of EMBO (since 2017) and became a Fellow of the Royal Society as well as the American Society of Pharmacognosy in 2023.

The ETH Laboratory of Organic Chemistry is honored to have Professor O’Connor present the Prelog Lecture 2024.

Photo of Prof. Sarah O'Connor: © Sebastian Reuter, Germany

All photos shown in the gallery below by Rahel Heeb | LOC