Sarah did her Ph.D. at the University of Technology, Sydney, and The Rockefeller University in NY, where she gained strong mass spectrometry (MS) proteomics expertise in the Laboratory of Mass Spectrometry and Gaseous Ion Chemistry with Dr. Brian Chait. She then undertook a postdoc position at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, with Dr. Niclas Karlsson which introduced her to glycobiology; the study of the identity and function of the glycans (sugars) attached to proteins. Sarah used her MS skills to successfully investigate the role of glycosylation in diseases of aging, particularly arthritis as well as autoimmune diseases including Sjogren’s syndrome, focusing on diagnosis. She developed the first selected reaction monitoring (SRM) (also called multiple reaction monitoring, MRM) method to characterize the entire range of O-glycans on a protein, applied to a protein critical in arthritis leading to a potential new diagnostic. She subsequently moved to Georgetown University and applied her skills towards understanding another critical disease of aging, Alzheimer’s disease, before starting her lab at the end of 2018. Sarah then accepted a tenure track position, moving the Flowers lab to the University of Virginia in June 2023.. Her work looks at the impact of glycosylation on the function of the APOE molecule, and how this might affect Alzheimer’s disease pathology and be important for very early AD diagnosis. The Flowers lab utilizes patient-derived iPSC disease models to understand carbohydrate modifications in human disease systems. Sarah is also interested in the impact of APOE isoforms on metabolism in different cell types involved in AD. Overall, her work is patient-focused, aiming to understand how changes in metabolism and carbohydrate post translational modifications impact pathogenesis and how these two critical factors interact, and translating this understanding into the early-stage diagnosis of diseases of aging like Alzheimer’s disease.