Sandra Angèle

International Course Project Manager

The Mérieux Foundation

Lyon, France

Sandra Angèle joined the Mérieux Foundation as International Course Project Manager in 2018 to ensure the sustainability and the quality of existing educational programs such as the Advanced Course of Vaccinology (ADVAC), co-organized with the University of Geneva since 2000, and the Advanced Course on Diagnostics (ACDx), co-organized with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine since 2010.

Her mission at the Medical and Scientific Direction, and especially within the Public Health Initiative team, is also to develop new educational programs on public health topics with a special focus on low- and middle-income countries. In collaboration with global public health experts and with the support of dedicated scientific committees, she developed two new courses for French speaking countries: the African Advanced Course on Diagnostics (Afro-ACDx), co-organized with the Institut Pasteur of Dakar in 2021, and a course focusing on Epidemiology in Complex Emergencies for Effective Surveillance and Response (Epi-Course), co-organized with Epiconcept in 2023. She leads the scientific committees of ACDx, Afro-ACDX and EpiCourse and collaborates with global health stakeholders (WHO, UNICEF, CHAI, DTRA, Institut Pasteur, LSHTM, FIND, NIH, Gates Foundation, Africa CDC, US CDC, WAHO, FAO, OOAS, Global Fund….). Sandra’s objective is to ensure the best scientific content, the optimal organization and financial sustainability of those advanced courses.

Prior to her experience at the Mérieux Foundation, Sandra worked for 13 years for bioMérieux, a world leader in the field of in vitro diagnostics. She held a position for 3 years as a regulatory affairs officer in charge of managing pre- and post-marketing product registration files with the European and American competent authorities before taking up a 10-year position of molecular biology team manager at Global Customer Service. She managed technical experts to support the bioMérieux subsidiaries and distributors, developed and organized training courses on molecular biology products while promoting the voice of the customers within project teams and programmes. She gained experience in quality management, performance monitoring and employee development.

Sandra started her career as scientist at INSERM and at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the cancer research agency of the World Health Organization (WHO). During her PhD and post-doctoral training, she studied molecular mechanisms involved in liver cancers and specifically the role of Ras gene mutations in vinyl chloride-induced liver tumours. She also studied the ataxia telangiectasia gene (ATM) as a risk factor in the development of sporadic breast carcinomas and the role of the ATM protein, involved in DNA repair, in the adverse reactions to radiotherapy in women with breast cancer.