Sonja Ingrid Berndt is an American pharmacologist and cancer epidemiologist who researches

non-Hodgkin lymphoma Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), also known as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, is a group of blood cancers that includes all types of lymphomas except Hodgkin lymphomas. Symptoms include enlarged lymph nodes, fever, night sweats, weight loss, and tirednes ...

, prostate cancer, and

anthropometric Anthropometry () refers to the measurement of the human individual. An early tool of physical anthropology, it has been used for identification, for the purposes of understanding human physical variation, in paleoanthropology and in various atte ...

traits that are cancer risk factors. She is a senior investigator in the occupational and environmental epidemiology branch at the

National Cancer Institute The National Cancer Institute (NCI) coordinates the United States National Cancer Program and is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is one of eleven agencies that are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ...

Life

Berndt was born to Helen and Bruce Berndt. She was raised with two sisters. She earned a B.A. in English with honors from

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...

in 1994. Berndt completed pre-pharmacy curriculum at the

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univers ...

in 1995. She received a Pharm.D. summa cum laude from the

University of Michigan College of Pharmacy The University of Michigan College of Pharmacy is located on the central campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As of 2016 it was tied as the third ranked pharmacy school in the US. History Pharmacy was first taught at the Univers ...

in 1999. From 1999 to 2000, she was a pharmacy practice resident and clinical instructor at the University of Michigan Medical Center. In 2000, Berndt enrolled in the Ph.D. program in epidemiology at the

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is the public health graduate school of Johns Hopkins University, a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. As the second independent, degree-granting institution for research in epi ...

. She joined the

(NCI) division of cancer epidemiology and genetics (DCEG) in 2003 as a pre-doctoral fellow. Berndt completed her Ph.D. in epidemiology in 2006. Her dissertation was titled, ''Genetic polymorphisms in DNA repair genes and the risk of colorectal neoplasia''. Kathy J. Helzlsouer was her doctoral advisor and Richard B. Hayes was her mentor at NCI. She became a post-doctoral fellow in 2006 within the NCI occupational and environmental epidemiology branch. In 2009, Berndt was appointed to the position of tenure-track investigator at the NCI. She was awarded scientific tenure and promoted to senior investigator in March 2017. Berndt’s research focuses on the genetic and molecular etiology of

(NHL) and prostate cancer, as well as

traits that are known risk factors for cancer. She uses statistics to investigate underlying risk factors for cancer.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Berndt, Sonja Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) Dartmouth College alumni University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni University of Michigan College of Pharmacy alumni Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health alumni National Institutes of Health people 21st-century American women scientists American pharmacologists American women epidemiologists American epidemiologists American pharmacists Women pharmacologists Women pharmacists Cancer epidemiologists