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Dr. Sara Sawyer combines methods from bioinformatics, genomics, and evolutionary theory to investigate emerging human and animal viruses. Sawyer received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Kansas. She then worked as a offshore drilling engineer in the Gulf of Mexico before earning her Ph.D. in Genetics and Development from Cornell University. During her graduate studies, Dr. Sawyer investigated the regulation of DNA replication in yeast. She then obtained postdoctoral training with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center working on the molecular evolution of antiviral proteins, where she developed a bioinformatic method for identifying interactions between host and virus proteins. Dr. Sawyer then served as an Assistant Professor at UT Austin, where a collaborative study led to the creation of HIV resistant immune cells.

Dr. Sawyer was recruited to the BioFrontiers Institute in 2014 as an Associate Professor in the . Both genomics and virology inform Dr. Sawyer’s current inquiry into the co-evolutionary dynamics between virus and host. The Sawyer lab turns to genomics to trace the evolutionary history of antiviral genes in humans and primates, as well as viral protei