PolicyLab

Sarah Wood (she/her) is a faculty member at PolicyLab, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and serves as assistant director of Adolescent HIV Services in the Craig Dalsimer Division of Adolescent Medicine at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Dr. Wood began her career in health care as a teen health educator and street outreach worker, and built upon these experiences to develop a life-long career committed to improving sexual and reproductive health outcomes in adolescents and young adults. She provides medical care to youth living with HIV at the CHOP Adolescent Initiative Clinic, and sexual and reproductive health care, including long-active reversible contraception, through CHOP’s Adolescent Gynecology Clinic. Her research focuses primarily on biobehavioral prevention of HIV and STIs in adolescents, with an emphasis on improving access to sexual health services, HIV testing and HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis in primary care. Dr. Wood is also the project leader for a CHOP quality improvement initiative aiming to improve chlamydia screening rates among young women seeking primary care.  

Dr. Wood received her medical degree at the Drexel University College of Medicine and a master's degree in health policy research from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Wood is the recipient of a Young Investigator Award from the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, and is currently funded through a K23 award through the National Institute of Mental Health. She has received pilot funding awards from the Penn Center for AIDS Research and the Penn Mental Health AIDS Research Center to support her work examining the roles of social support and mental health across HIV prevention care continuum. She also received pilot grant funding from PolicyLab and the Center for Pediatric Clinical Effectiveness Research to support her projects focusing on improving access to sexual health services in primary care.