Professorship awarded to Ashley Sanders
Dr. Ashley Sanders, Group Leader of the Genome Instability and Somatic Mosaicism lab at the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology of the Max Delbrück Center (MDC-BIMSB), has been awarded a W3 professorship from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in the Faculty of Medicine. This prestigious recognition honors Sanders’ contributions to the field of single-cell DNA sequencing, where she has helped redefine our understanding of genomic structure and variability.
“The professorship is a complete game-changer for me and my team,” says Sanders, who has been a junior group leader at the Max Delbrück Center since only 2021.
Through her research, Sanders has expanded the scope of single-cell genomics beyond RNA analysis to include DNA. She helped develop Strand-seq, a technique that enables scientists to detect structural variants – such as inversions, duplications, and deletions – in the DNA of individual cells. Her work has revealed that that somatic genomic mosaicism is more common than previously thought – challenging the longstanding assumption that all cells in a person’s body share an identical DNA sequence. Moreover, Sanders’ research suggests that structural variation in our cellular DNA may contribute to the development cancer, inflammatory bowel and autoimmune diseases. Such insights, she hopes, will lay the groundwork for personalized medicine.
Her professorship officially begins on September 1, 2025. “It’s a tremendous honor,” Sanders says with excitement. “We now have the stability and long-term perspective to fulfill the vision we started with.”
Text: Gunjan Sinha
Further information
The pioneer of single cell sequencing (profile of Ashley Sanders)
