Sarah graduated with First class honours in biochemistry, then studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1992 where she graduated with the Gold Medal for top student. She has worked on research into neurodegenerative diseases since her PhD as an MRC clinical training fellow at UCL. After clinical training, she obtained a DH National Clinician Scientist Fellowship in 2002 to work on protein misfolding at UCL. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant Neurologist in 2003, and to Full Professor in 2009. Sarah is Director of the UCL Huntington’s Disease Centre, which she co-founded with Professor Gill Bates in 2016, and Joint Head of Department Neurodegenerative Disease at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology.

In addition to basic bench science, which focuses on basic cellular mechanisms of neurodegeneration in Huntington’s disease (HD), she also leads a large translational research programme in HD that is working towards finding effective disease-modifying treatments.  Sarah has published over350 peer-reviewed publications to date and her research work has been the subject of articles in NEJM, The Economist, Scientific American, and The Lancet.  She serves on several expert panels including for the UK HD association, the European HD Network, NINDS/NIH, and the MRC Nucleic Acid Therapies Accelerator Board. Sarah co-founded the UK All Party Parliamentary Group for HD in 2010, and was elected a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences in 2014. In 2017 she received the seventh Leslie Gehry Brenner Prize for Innovation in Science awarded by the Hereditary Disease Foundation. In 2018 she was appointed as a Principal Investigator at the UK Dementia Research Institute Hub, and received the Cotzias Award from the Spanish Society of Neurology. In 2019 she received the Yahr Award at the World Congress for Neurology and the Alexander Morison Medal from the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. In 2022, she received the Osler Medal from the Association of Physicians of Great Britain and Ireland, and the MRC Millennium Medal for her outstanding achievements in medical research.