Sarah Sheppard is a clinical investigator at NICHD and a 2021 NIH Distinguished Scholar. She graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelors of science in Nuclear Science and Engineering. She attained her medical degree and doctorate through a combined MD PhD program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. During her doctorate, Dr. Sheppard studied post-transcriptional regulation of vascular development in the zebrafish in the laboratory of Dr. Nathan Lawson. She then completed her combined pediatrics and clinical genetics residency at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Following her clinical training, she practiced as a clinical geneticist in Division of Human Genetics, the Comprehensive Vascular Anomaly Program, and the Jill and Mark Fishman Lymphatic Center at CHOP. She completed a Masters of Translational Research at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Hakon Hakonarson in the Center of Applied Genomics at CHOP. Her post-doctoral work focused on improving diagnosis and treatment for patients with a type of lymphatic disorder called central conducting lymphatic anomaly. Her accolades include the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Distinguished Research Trainee Award (2019) and the Association for Clinical and Translational Sciences Outstanding Post-Doctoral Trainee Award (2020). In addition to the NIH, her research has been funded by the American Heart Association, the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, the Institute of Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Uplifting Athletes, and the Lymphangiomatosis and Gorham’s Disease Alliance.