Sandrine Lavallé holds a Master’s degree in Socio-Educational Communication and a Master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. She started working at Alzheimer Europe, a non-governmental organisation, aiming to promote the voice of people with dementia and their carers. Currently, she works for the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH), where she started as a Communication Officer. Her first task was to popularize the results of biomedical research to the public. The communication was essentially unidirectional: to inform the population on the research FOR patients. In 2013, she discovered EUPATI (European Patient Patients’ Academy on Therapeutic Innovation) whose mission is to train patients in the field of research so that they can collaborate and co-create with researchers. She is convinced by its approach, which proposes a two-way communication, a research WITH patients. She followed the EUPATI Patient Expert training, became EUPATI Fellow, then a member of the EUPATI Board and also developed, with a small group of convinced people, the EUPATI Luxembourg association. In 2017, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Being a patient strengthened her convictions. Consequently, since January 2022, she started to work as “Engagement & Communication Officer” in the LIH, a position that aims to involve actively patients in all aspects of research, including research questions, study design, communication… The goal is to integrate the experiential knowledge of patients (from living with the disease) with the academic knowledge of researchers to humanize the research.
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