Sarah trained in medicine at the universities of London and Cambridge and has had postgraduate experience of general medicine and diabetes, general practice and public health medicine. She did an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She enjoyed a postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular epidemiology at Stanford University and a secondment to the Burden of Disease team at the World Health Organization in Geneva. Sarah has been senior lecturer in epidemiology and public health at the University of Edinburgh and honorary consultant in public health medicine at NHS Lothian since September 2002 and was promoted to reader in August 2009. Her main academic interests are the epidemiology of diabetes and cardiovascular disease and her current major research projects include linkage of Scottish national diabetes register data to other sources of health data and a genetic epidemiology project based in Orkney.