Sarah Darby

Education Darby studied mathematics at Imperial College London (BSc) and mathematical statistics at the University of Birmingham (MSc).

Career and research After her PhD, she worked at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, the National Radiological Protection Board, and the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, before moving to the University of Oxford in 1984. Her major funder since then has been Cancer Research UK.

She and her team have also estimated the absolute size of the benefit of radiotherapy to breast cancer patients and their work is enabling comparison of the likely absolute benefit of radiotherapy with its likely absolute risk for individual patients.

Other topics that Darby has worked on include estimating the risk of lung cancer from residential radon, the risk of invasive breast cancer after a diagnosis of ductal carcinoma in situ, and the risk of cancer after computerised tomography (CT) scans in young people.

Awards and honours Darby was awarded the Guy Medal in Bronze in 1988 by the Royal Statistical Society. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2019 and of the Academy of Medical Sciences in the same year.