Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), and the Department of Medicine, Division of Genetic Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). Her work is focused on understanding causal factors contributing to substance use disorders and diseases characterized by high levels of impulsivity. In the past, she has used behavioral and pharmacological experiments and molecular analysis to address this question, with special emphasis on translational validity to human studies. Her current research focuses on the quantitative analysis of complex traits in humans, and translating some of the research findings in mouse and rat models. More recently, she has used big data and advanced technologies to identify individuals with substance use disorders based on data contained in electronic health records. For this work, she collaborates with many professional societies and international consortiums (the psycheMERGE Consortium, the Externalizing Consortium, the Latin American Genomics Consortium, the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium). Over the next decade, she seeks to integrate the oceans of data generated by human addiction genetics research with data from model organisms, with the goal of furthering our biological understanding of addiction and bringing the most promising results to the clinic.