Since 2013 Otto has been the director of the Liber Ero Fellowship program, a post-doctoral fellowship program that supports early-career scientists to conduct and communicate research that informs conservation and management issues. In 2006 she co-founded the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution. She has also served as the Vice-President and President for The Society for the Study of Evolution, The American Society of Naturalists and The European Society of Evolutionary Biology as well as a council member of The Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Genetic Association.

Otto received her B.Sc. in 1988 and her Ph.D. in 1992 from Stanford University. She did post-doctoral research with Nick Barton at the University of Edinburgh.

Sarah Perin “Sally” Otto FRSC (born October 23, 1967) is a theoretical biologist, Canada Research Chair in Theoretical and Experimental Evolution, and former director of the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia (2008 – 2016). Otto was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. In 2015 the American Society of Naturalists gave her the Sewall Wright Award for fundamental contributions to the unification of biology.