Rate My Professor Sarah Blagden

Professor Sarah Blagden is Professor of Experimental Oncology in the Department of Oncology at the University of Oxford. She holds BSc, FRCP and PhD degrees. Following medical training, she completed specialist training in Medical Oncology at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge and the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. She was awarded a CRUK Junior Clinician Scientist PhD fellowship to study fruit fly genetics at Cambridge University from 2000 to 2004 and later held a Clinical Fellowship at the Institute of Cancer Research’s Drug Development Unit.

She was appointed Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant at Imperial College in 2006, where she specialised in treating gynaecological cancers, launched the institution’s Early Phase Trial portfolio and established her laboratory studying the dysregulation of mRNA translation in cancer. In 2015 she moved to the University of Oxford and is now Professor of Experimental Oncology. She served as Director of the Early Phase Clinical Trials Unit until 2021, when she assumed leadership of the Oxford Cancer Trials Office (OCTO), running a national trials portfolio specialising in early phase, Precision Prevention and Early Detection studies. She is Lead for OCTO and Interim chair for the Athena Swan Committee in the Department of Oncology. A clinician-scientist, her research investigates post-transcriptional mechanisms that drive cancer behaviour, particularly the transition from precancer to invasive cancer, and novel cancer preventives and therapeutics, with a focus on post-transcriptional gene regulation in precancer progression. She has been chief or principal investigator for numerous national and international clinical studies.