Sarah Richardson

Dr. Sarah Richardson grew up in west Baltimore. She earned a B.S. in biology from the University of Maryland in 2004 and a Ph.D. in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology from Johns Hopkins University in 2011. She was awarded a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship to pursue research on algorithms for the design of synthetic nucleotide sequences and the engineering and assembly of a synthetic yeast genome. Sarah joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2012 as a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in Genomics at the DOE Joint Genome Institute and the DOE Joint Bioenergy Institute to work on massive scale bioengineering projects and the genomics of non-model bacteria. In 2015 she was awarded a Synthetic Biology Leadership Excellence Accelerator Program fellowship and in 2016 a L'Oréal Women in Science Postdoctoral fellowship. In 2020 She was given the Next Generation Award by the Association for Women in Science in recognition of her vision and technical leadership. In 2017 she became a Cyclotron Road fellow and was granted seed funding to found a biotech company. She is now the CEO of MicroByre, a company dedicated to the domestication of non-model bacteria.