Joanna Sickler

Joanna Sickler is vice president of health policy and external affairs at Roche Diagnostics, where she works at the intersection of diagnostics, public health, and health policy. Her career spans the diagnostics and pharmaceutical industries and the nonprofit sector, with a focus on implementation science and on policies that expand access to medical innovation. Earlier in her career she led access programs at the Clinton Health Access Initiative and managed hepatitis-product marketing at Gilead Sciences.

Much of Sickler’s work has centered on global cervical-cancer prevention, advocating with governments to expand national screening programs and to link HPV and cervical-cancer diagnoses to treatment. She holds a master’s in public health and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University, and has undertaken doctoral studies in public health at Johns Hopkins University.

Sickler appeared on Open Door Salon alongside Kathryn Schubert, president and chief executive of the Society for Women’s Health Research, for a conversation on the gaps in women’s health. Speaking from the diagnostics-and-policy vantage point, she emphasized how much of women’s long-term health is set early and goes unmeasured: pregnancy as a window into future cardiovascular risk, pre-eclampsia raising the risk of hypertension decades later, and conditions like endometriosis that affect roughly one in ten women yet still require surgery to diagnose.

Her recurring theme was that the field’s problem is less a shortage of innovation than a shortage of implementation, and that employers are beginning to see measurable returns on investing in women’s health benefits, a sign the economic case is catching up with the medical one.