Biography
Dr Sara Pensa received her PhD in Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Turin, Italy. She was then awarded a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (FP7) to study mammary gland developmental pathways and their link to cancer in the laboratory of Prof Christine Watson at the Department of Pathology, Cambridge. She joined Dr Khaled's lab in 2014, where her research focuses on the characterisation of the early stages of breast cancer, with the aim to find better strategies for the early detection and treatment of the disease. More broadly interested in health and research inequalities and research capacity strengthening in low- and middle- income countries, she also recently completed a MSc in Public Health with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Publications
- Pensa S, Liu P, Khaled TW. (2021) The generation of a Bcl11a lineage tracing mouse model. bioRxiv. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.26.453822v1
- Bach, K*, Pensa, S*, Zarocsinceva M, Kania K, Stockis J, Pinaud S, Lazarus KA, Shehata M, Simoes BM, Greenhalgh A, Howell SJ, Clarke RB, Caldas C, Halim TYF, Marioni JC, Khaled WT. (2021) Time-resolved single-cell analysis of Brca1 associated mammary tumorigenesis reveals aberrant differentiation of luminal progenitors. Nat Commun. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21783-3
- Bach K, Pensa S, Grzelak M, Hadfield J, Adams DJ, Marioni JC, Khaled WT. (2017) Differentiation dynamics of mammary epithelial cells revealed by single-cell RNA sequencing. Nat Commun. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02001-5
Other Professional Activities
Dr Pensa is passionate about race and gender equality and women empowerment. She is a member of the Department of Pharmacology Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee (https://bit.ly/3k3UiQO) and became a member of the Race Equality Network committee in January 2022 (https://bit.ly/3YypuH1). She recently joined the University Research Culture Steering Committee as Postdoc representative.
