Dr Sarah Atkinson MRes.PhD
NI Centre of Stratified Medicine, CTRIC, Ulster University
Sarah attended Queen’s University, Belfast, where she was awarded a BSc (Hons) in Biological Science. Building upon her undergraduate degree, she moved to the Ulster University and completed an MRes in Biomedical Sciences focusing on diseases of the front of the eye and this was followed by her successful doctoral investigations in angiogenesis. Sarah’s post-doctoral research projects have all had the primary focus of improving diagnostics and allowing stratification of eye diseases. On sabbatical to the University of Dundee, Sarah became interested in development of siRNA therapies and has continued this research, applying it to a number of corneal dystrophy-related eye diseases. Sarah has recently been recruited as a lecturer to the Northern Ireland Centre for Stratified Medicine within the Ulster University.
Sarah consistently publishes her research findings in high impact peer reviewed journals including Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science (IOVS) and British Journal of Ophthalmology (BJO). A recent publication by Sarah in the top ranked Dermatology journal; Journal of Investigative Ophthalmology (JID), was identified by Faculty of 1000, a post publication peer review faculty who select papers important in its field.
As part of the newly developed Stratified Medicine team at Ulster, Sarah has a key role in the application of stratified medicine to the diagnosis and treatment of conditions which can result in blindness. Her initial objective is to identify novel markers, mostly genetic ones, to allow diseases to be stratified according to their disease-causing mutation and follow this with the development of very specific and potent personalized treatments in the form of molecular drugs known to target only the mutant disease causing allele.