Sarah K. England is a physiologist and biophysicist and the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Washington University School of Medicine.
[1] Her family moved to the Highland Park neighbourhood in 1969 after the Fair Housing Act was passed so that England and her four brothers could obtain a better quality education.
[2] She majored in biology and conducted research under the mentorship of John W. Osborn at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul studying the sympathetic nervous system response after barodenervation.
[5] She continued to study voltage-gated potassium channel biophysics, exploring the role they play in smooth muscle tone in the vascular system and how their activity is implicated in blood pressure regulation.
[5] She published a first author paper in the Proceedings of the National Academia of Sciences in 1995 characterizing the presence and functionality of beta subunits of voltage-gated potassium channels in human heart tissue.
[7] In 1997, England was appointed to the faculty at the University of Iowa, becoming an assistant professor in the Carver College of Medicine in the Departments of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics.
[11] From 2005 to 2006, England took a one-year leave from her roles at the University of Iowa to become a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow in the Office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on Capitol Hill.
[12] During this time, she helped draft legislations on issues related to her research on preterm birth and pregnancy, efficiently linking her science to policy changes.
[19] In a following study, England and her team explored how oxytocin increases the excitability of smooth muscle in the uterus and she found that it inhibits the SLO2.1 potassium channels to modulate electrical activity.
[21] England and Erik D. Herzog, a colleague at Washington University who studies chronobiology, explored how daily rhythms change in pregnancy.