
Professor Sarah Kummerfeld
Professor Sarah Kummerfeld is the Chief Scientific Officer at the Garvan Institute for Medical Research. She oversees Garvan’s platforms, leveraging genomics, single-cell technology, data science, imaging, antibody engineering and clinical translation to understand human disease and translate findings into clinical diagnostics and treatments. The platforms aim to push technological boundaries both in the lab and through machine learning/AI.
Professor Kummerfeld began her science career majoring in computer science and biochemistry at the University of Sydney. She then completed her PhD in Computational Biology at the University of Cambridge and postdoctoral research at Stanford University before a 10 year stint at biotech company, Genentech. At Genentech, she used large-scale genomics approaches to study patient responses to treatments and to identify diagnostic biomarkers that predict drug response.
Medical Minds Podcast
Selected publications
See all publications- 2025Cancer Discovery10.1158/2159-8290.CD-24-0684
AAnet resolves a continuum of spatially-localized cell states to unveil intratumoral heterogeneity.
- 2024The EMBO Journal10.1038/s44318-024-00210-5
Human genomic DNA is widely interspersed with i-motif structures.
- 2024Parkinsonism & Related Disorders10.1016/j.parkreldis.2024.107010
Genome sequencing reanalysis increases the diagnostic yield in dystonia.
- 2024Nature Communications10.1038/s41467-024-46456-9
A universal molecular control for DNA, mRNA and protein expression.
- 2023Cancers10.3390/cancers16010012
Quantitative ctDNA Detection in Hepatoblastoma: Implications for Precision Medicine.