Dr. Sarah Zinnen Tasker

Sarah Tasker was born in Ohio but grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She received her B.Sc. in Chemistry with a double major in Spanish from Calvin College (now Calvin University) in 2010. She did undergraduate research with Professors Chad Tatko and Carolyn Anderson, before moving on to do her Ph.D. with Tim Jamison at MIT, working to develop new nickel-catalyzed reactions. In 2015, Dr. Tasker moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar with Paul Hergenrother. She investigated chemical diversification of natural products for high-throughput screening libraries. In 2018, Dr. Tasker started as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, where she teaches Organic and General Chemistry.  She does research in the fields of photochemical reaction methodology and antibacterial natural products with a talented team of undergraduate research students.