Sara is the global IP and innovation strategist at Tate & Lyle PLC (a global ingredient solutions provider, headquartered in London, England). In her role, Sara is the legal, technical and commercial business partner on all intellectual property matters across the global business. Her focus is to elevate IP throughout the organization by protecting proprietary assets, educating business units, fostering an innovation culture to create value across the organization, strategically driving and managing global IP assets to maximize investments, advancing business objectives by creating and implementing global defensive and offensive IP strategies to mitigate risk, monetizing IP assets, implementing cost containment measures, and partnering with R&D, nutrition, regulatory, global operations, M&A, open innovation, procurement, marketing and sales teams to accelerate commercial success. Sara is a registered with the US Patent & trademark Office and an attorney licensed in Wisconsin, Illinois and Texas. Sara has 25 years of experience in the IP field. Prior to joining Tate & Lyle, she was an associate and partner in the IP practice groups of national law firms, Quarles & Brady and Michael Best & Friedrich LLP, where she advised universities and companies in the biotechnology field, specifically, human stem cells, structural genomics and proteomics. Notably, in 2004, she wrote a seminal paper on the patentability of structural genomics and proteomics, and was invited to the National Academy of Sciences, where she shared her global insights with the nation's policy makers. Sara earned a B.S. in biochemistry from Trinity University, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Notre Dame and a law degree from Marquette University. Sara speaks Farsi (born in Shiraz, Iran), has two adult children and her husband is a Partner at the law firm of McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP (MBHB).