Sarah S. Donaldson is an American pediatric radiation oncologist and professor at Stanford University.
Donaldson was born in Portland, Oregon, where she attended Grant High School and graduated in 1956.
She completed a five-year degree in nursing at the University of Oregon in 1961, after which she worked for William S. Fletcher, a surgical oncologist, for several years as his assistant.
[1][2] Donaldson decided to pursue radiation oncology, a field to which she had some exposure when working with Fletcher, as his patients sometimes had neoadjuvant radiotherapy before he operated on them.
[3] During that time, she was mentored by Henry Kaplan, and when she expressed an interest in pediatric radiation oncology, which was not yet an established specialty, Kaplan encouraged her to travel to France to complete a one-year fellowship at Institut Gustave Roussy.