Dr. Sara Olson is a Research Director at Lux Research and leads Lux’s Food, Health, and Wellness research program. In this role, she monitors and evaluates opportunities coming from technology areas like advanced crop protection, personalized nutrition, precision agriculture, and genomics. Sara manages a team of analysts, helping clients with questions regarding the diverse regulatory pressures affecting the agri-food industries, and developing strategies to drive innovation in the rapidly evolving global food and health industries.

Sara has a decade of experience in crop genetics and biochemistry. She has led research teams focusing on quantitative functional genomics of crop plants with implications for advancing nitrogen use efficiency, drought tolerance, and biomass generation in both food and fuel-generation applications. She has been an invited speaker at numerous international conferences, and has authored multiple primary publications in major journals on topics including genomics, phenomics, and crop protection. Sara has a B.S. with honors in Biology and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Texas A&M University.