O'Donovan is a specialist of biocuration. She joined the EMBL Data Library in 1993, following a BSc (Hons) degree in biochemistry and a diploma in computer science from the University College Cork, Ireland. In 1994, she moved to the new EMBL site, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, GB. In 2019, she is reponsible for the Metabolomics Team: her team is responsible for the MetaboLights database (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/metabolights/). O'Donovan was also responsible for the Protein Function Content team and the biocuration of the Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) databases. These include UniProt (https://www.uniprot.org), the Gene Ontology Annotation project (https://www.uniprot.org/help/uniprotkb) and the Enzyme Portal (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/enzymeportal/).