Saskia Sanderson

Saskia C Sanderson PhD is Chief Behavioural Scientist at Early Disease Detection Research Project UK (EDDRP UK), which she joined in May 22. She is also an Associate at the PHG Foundation in Cambridge, UK, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, US.  She holds a PhD from UCL on psychosocial issues in genetic testing for complex disease susceptibility, which was funded by Cancer Research UK, and is a Chartered Health Psychologist. After completing her PhD, Dr Sanderson was awarded a joint MRC and ESRC Interdisciplinary Research Training Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she completed at the UCL Centre for Cardiovascular Genetics. She then moved to the US to complete a post-doctoral fellowship in the Social and Behavioral Research Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), NIH, Bethesda. She subsequently took up an Assistant Professor position at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, where she worked for four years before moving back to the UK. While in the US, Dr Sanderson was one of the Principal Investigators on the ENGAGE project (Engaging Neighborhoods in General and Personalized Genomics Education), a Co-Investigator on the NHGRI-funded project ‘Biorepositories for Genomic Medicine in Diverse Communities,’ and a member of the Consent, Education, Regulation and Consultation workgroup of the eMERGE (Electronic Medical Records and Genomics) II Network. In the UK, Dr Sanderson then spent three years working as a Senior Research Social Scientist at Great Ormond Street Hospital, where she conducted research on informed consent and decision-making in the 1, Genomes Project. She also worked on the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) -funded PROMISE (Predicting Risk of Ovarian Malignancies, Improved Screening and Early Detection) research programme, where her work included the development of a decision aid to help women make informed choices about stratified ovarian cancer risk-management, and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Health Informatics at UCL.