Ashley Sanders is a junior Group Leader who started her laboratory in 2021 at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) of Berlin. She is also a Principal Investigator in the “Single cell Approaches for Personalized Medicine” focus area, which was jointly formed between the MDC, the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) and the Charité University Hospital. Throughout her scientific career, Ashley has developed and applied innovative single cell genomic technologies to solve biomedical and translational problems. Ashley completed her doctoral studies in the laboratory of Dr. Peter Lansdorp (Vancouver, Canada) in 2016, where she co-developed one of the first single-cell sequencing methods ever published, called Strand-seq. She pursued her post-doctoral research within the laboratory of Dr. Jan Korbel at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL; Heidelberg, Germany), where she developed novel computational workflows that harness Strand-seq data to detect and characterize genetic variants in heterogenous single cell samples. Her current research focuses on characterizing germline and somatic genetic variation in human tissues to learn how mutations form, impact cell states and contribute to disease.