A computational and molecular biologist, Sarah Richardson specializes in germ wrangling. Sarah Richardson earned a BS in Biology at the University of Maryland College Park; with the support of a prestigious DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship she earned a PhD in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. As a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow of Genomics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory she worked on massive scale synthetic biology projects and the integration of computational genomics with experimental genomics. In 2015 she was also one of five promising young female scientists to receive a postdoctoral fellowship award from L’Oréal USA; she proposed to study CRISPR systems and the domestication of non-model bacteria. In 2015, she was named a SynBio LEAP Fellow based on her “leadership potential and vision for shaping a future in biotechnology.” In 2020 she was awarded the Association for Women in Science’s Next Generation Award for leadership and vision.