Sara E. Dempster, PhD
Founder and Principal
SDempsterConsulting LLC
Sara Dempster, PhD is currently an independent consultant with over 15 years of experience in data analysis and interpretation in diverse scientific and medical fields including genetics, genomics, and epidemiology. Sara has participated in OMOP/OHDSI since 2014, most recently leading and coordinating teams at IQVIA, FDA, Columbia, Stanford and Regnestrief to run OHDSI network studies as part of FDA’s CBER BEST sentinel project. Previously, Sara worked at AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals as an associate principal scientist and informatics analyst where, from 2014-17, Sara led the creation of an analytics platform for observational studies based on the OMOP Common Data Model. During this time, Sara also provided methodological and informatics support to study teams in epidemiology and global medical affairs at AstraZeneca. From 2010-2013, Sara led the development of next generation sequencing analysis platforms for the oncology and infection innovative medicine groups at AstraZeneca pharmaceuticals.
Originally trained in theoretical chemistry and biophysics, Sara received a BA magna cum laude in chemistry from Bryn Mawr college and a PhD in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following her graduate work, Sara completed a National Library of Medicine postdoctoral training fellowship in biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical school and Boston Childrens’ hospital where she focused on analyzing large genome-wide molecular data sets. Sara also spent time teaching chemistry, and genetics and genomics to Harvard undergraduates during her postdoctoral work.
Boyce, RD. Voss, EA., Huser, V., Evans, L., Reich, C., Duke JD., Tatonetti, NP., Dumontier, M., Hauben, M., Wallberg, M., Peng, L., Dempster, S., He, Y., Sena, A., Ryan, PB., Large-scale adverse effects related to treatment evidence standardization (LAERTES): an open scalable system for linking pharmacovigilance evidence sources with clinical data. Journal of Biomedical Semantics volume 8, Article number: 11 (2017).
Comparison of Methods to Generalize Randomized Clinical Trial Results Without Individual-Level Data for the Target Population. Jin-Liern Hong, Michael Webster-Clark, Jonsson Funk,Til Stürmer , Sara E. Dempster, Stephen R Cole, Iksha Herr, Robert Locasale, Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 188, Issue 2, February 2019, Pages 426–437.
Generalizing Randomized Clinical Trial Results: Implementation and Challenges Related to Missing Data in the Target Population. Jin-Liern Hong, Michelle Jonsson Funk, Robert Locasale, Sara E. Dempster, Stephen R Cole, Michael Webster-Clark, Jessie K Edwards, Til Stürmer, American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 187, Issue 4, April 2018, Pages 817–827.
Mikhail Kosiborod, Matthew Cavender, Anna Norhammar, John Wilding, Kamlesh Khunti, Alex Z. Fu, Reinhard W Holl, MD, PhD; Kåre I Birkeland, MD, Marit Eika Jørgensen, Niklas Hammar, Johan Bodegård, Betina Blak, Eric T Wittbrodt, Sara Dempster, Markus Scheerer, Niki Arya, Markus Thuresson, Peter Fenici in behalf of the CVD-REAL Investigators and Study Group, Lower Rates of Hospitalization for Heart Failure and All-Cause Death in New Users of SGLT-2 Inhibitors versus other glucose lowering drugs – real world data from 6 countries and more that 300,000 patients: The CVD-REAL Study. Presented at ACC 2017, Washington DC, March 2017.
Mikhail Kosiborod, Matthew Cavender, Anna Norhammar, John Wilding, Kamlesh Khunti, Alex Z. Fu, Reinhard Holl, Peter Fenici, Johan Bodegård, Betina Blak, Kelly Bell, Sara Dempster, Markus Scheerer, Niki Arya, Niklas Hammar, Characteristics of patients initiating sodium glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors (SGLT-2i) compared to patients initiating other glucose lowering drugs (GLD) – a study across four countries with more than 1.4 million patients. Presented at 14’th World Congress on Insulin Resistance and Cardiovascular Disease, Los Angeles, CA, December 2016.
