Dr. med. Sandra Apondo

Sandra Apondo studied medicine, history and Slavic studies in Heidelberg. She also completed a Master in Medical Education (MME) in Heidelberg and a Master in Health Business Administration (MHBA) in Nuremberg-Erlangen. She is a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy and worked for 10 years at the Clinic for General Psychiatry at Heidelberg University Hospital and at the Central Institute (ZI) for Mental Health in Mannheim. She is a trainer of experience experts (EX-IN) in psychiatry and is involved in public relations activities to destigmatize mental illness. She completed her doctorate in Heidelberg in 2017 on skills-based curriculum development for medical interviewing. Since April 2025, she is a visiting researcher at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) in Odense at the Department of Culture and Language and is working on reflection processes of medical students through teaching methods of narrative medicine. In 2022, Sandra Apondo made her own cancer public and has since advocated for an open approach to the experience of illness. She writes illness narratives herself (currently for the "Beyond Expediency" project, among others). She is a member of the Cancer Research Patient Advisory Board of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg.

Since 2024, she heads the Chair´s Curriculum and Faculty Development team.

Thematic focus areas:

• Professional Identity Formation in medical studies
• History-informed Professional Identity Formation
• Experiential expertise and Patient Involvement in teaching and research
• Interdisciplinarity of medicine and the humanities in curriculum development
• Images of doctors in medicine and society
• Narrative Medicine and Medical Humanities in curriculum development
• Investigation of medical students' learning processes using qualitative methods