Sarah Sharif is the founder of Futura Apex Advisory, a futures and foresight strategy consultancy she started in 2017.
Her career has run through healthcare and life sciences. She spent years in human-centered design and strategy consulting, working with global pharmaceutical companies on how patients actually move through treatment, including rare disease journeys where the gaps between what the system offers and what people need are widest. That work taught her to start with the person in the room rather than the product.
Today she works in clinical AI inside a large academic health system, leading strategy, evaluation, and clinician advisory programs. The work sits where new technology meets the exam room, testing what a future clinical encounter should feel like before anyone commits to building it. Her peer-reviewed research covers clinician experience with ambient AI documentation and the ethics of informed consent when AI is present during care.
She is an adjunct professor in both a graduate computer science and business administration programs, and her book, The Future Is Taboo, arrives from Georgetown University Press in 2027. She has spoken at the Dubai Future Forum, Oxford University, and SXSW.
A dual British-American citizen raised in Reading, England, she lives in Hudson Yards, New York.
Industry: Healthcare and life sciences. Specifically clinical AI and digital health in ambulatory care, plus futures and foresight strategy across sectors.
Why I’m excited to be part of WIN Awards: Healthcare innovation usually gets told as a story about technology, and that story isn’t always sexy. The real work is slow and consistent, moving the needle however small, but the work is about people: patients, healthcare staff, researchers.
Every one of us ends up on the other side of it eventually, in a room where we need the treatment to work or the clinician to make the right call. Taking care of each other in those moments is the whole point. Healthcare will look incredibly different a decade from now, and what that difference is made of is still being decided.
WIN tells it as a story about the women doing that work. I am grateful not to be alone in it, in the effort to innovate and to support each other.
The future gets built. I build with the people ready to take the reins alongside me. Who says it can’t be better.
