Sarah Otto 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). She is currently a professor of zoology at UBC.

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.