Sanne has abackground founded in many different disciplines, starting her academics path at the University of Manchester in the UK, with a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. She obtained her DPhil at the University of Oxford in Bioinformatics, and after that moved to Amsterdam for a Postdoc in Computational Biophysics at Amolf. Subsequently, she moved to the Vriie Universiteit Amsterdam, as an assistant and later associated professor in Bioinformatics. She also the programme director for the master Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, at the Vrije Universiteit and University of Amsterdam. Currently, she has set up a new group at Utrecht University, working on AI technology for the Life Sciences, with a focus on explainable AI.

She has also been an active community member, for example, during her PhD she was part of board of the ISCB Student Council. She was also co-chair of the largest European Bioinformatics conference ECCB 2016 en co-chair of the BNAIC/Benelearn conference in 2024. In addition, she was om the board of Amsterdam Data Science, ISCB Translational Medicine Cosi and she is currently in the board of BioSB, TDCC-LSH and NWO Life Sciences RCC5.

Her group closely collaborates with the Dutch Cancer Institute and Amsterdam University Medical Center, on interpreting complex data on colorectal cancer and neurodegenerative diseases respectively.  In addition, her group works on AI for proteomics and Life Science image data.