Sonja Berndt

Berndt was born to Helen and Bruce Berndt.[1] She was raised with two sisters.[1] She earned a B.A. in English with honors from Dartmouth College in 1994.[1] Berndt completed pre-pharmacy curriculum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1995.[1] She received a Pharm.D. summa cum laude from the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy in 1999.[1] From 1999 to 2000, she was a pharmacy practice resident and clinical instructor at the University of Michigan Medical Center.[1] In 2000, Berndt enrolled in the Ph.D. program in epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.[1] She joined the National Cancer Institute (NCI) division of cancer epidemiology and genetics (DCEG) in 2003 as a pre-doctoral fellow.[2] Berndt completed her Ph.D. in epidemiology in 2006.[1] Her dissertation was titled, Genetic polymorphisms in DNA repair genes and the risk of colorectal neoplasia.[1] Kathy J. Helzlsouer was her doctoral advisor and Richard B. Hayes was her mentor at NCI.[1] She became a post-doctoral fellow in 2006 within the NCI occupational and environmental epidemiology branch.[2]

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.[2] Berndt’s research focuses on the genetic and molecular etiology of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and prostate cancer, as well as anthropometric traits that are known risk factors for cancer. She uses statistics to investigate underlying risk factors for cancer.[3]