 O'Connor was appointed by the Max Planck Society in 2018 to head the Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, taking up her role during 2019.O'Connor received her Ph.D. working with on conformational effects induced by large proteins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, and later returned to MIT as a professor from 2003-2010.