Rate My Professor Sally Catt

Sally Catt serves as an Associate Professor in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Monash Health and a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University. She earned her first degree from Edinburgh University in 1983 and a PhD from the University of Sydney in 1998 on the feasibility and commercial practicality of producing lambs through X and Y sperm separation by flow cytometry, supported by a Meat Research Corporation Junior Fellowship in 1991. Her career commenced as a reproductive toxicologist before becoming an embryologist at Bourn Hall Clinic in Cambridge, UK, training under IVF pioneers Patrick Steptoe and Bob Edwards. She specialized in cattle IVF commercialization at ABC Technologies in Cambridge and DSIR in Palmerston North, New Zealand. In the early 1990s, she established a domestic and laboratory species IVF facility at the University of Sydney. She then worked as embryologist and Scientific Director at Fertility First in Sydney and as inaugural research division member at Sydney IVF, advancing vitrification of embryos and oocytes—now the global standard for cryopreservation, adopted from 2004 at Sydney IVF—along with media development, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and embryonic stem cell research. In 2004, she was Research Fellow at Leeds University with Professor Helen Picton, studying ovine pre-antral follicle growth, oocyte maturation, and fertilization.