Dr Sarah Cooper

Sarah obtained her PhD at the MRC-LMB in Cambridge with Andrew Travers studying transcription factor degradation in neuronal development and heterochromatin formation in Drosophila. She then moved to the laboratory of Neil Brockdorff in Oxford for her post-doctoral studies where her main research interest was the recruitment of Polycomb proteins to chromatin in mouse embryonic stem cells. During her time in Oxford she was a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College and held a Stipendiary Lecturer position at Somerville College where she was joint tutor for Biochemistry. She moved to the Sanger Institute to work on the neurodegeneration Open Targets project with Andrew Bassett, developing methods to screen for causative GWAS SNPs in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease using Crispr/Cas9 in human iPS derived neurons. She is now a Senior Staff Scientist at the Sanger Institute and is involved in leading the experimental side of the neurodegeneration Open Targets projects.