Sasha Ottey, MHA, MLS(ASCP)

Opening Plenary: Accelerating Progress, Expanding Access

Panel Topic: Name Change Perspectives

Sasha Ottey, MHA, MLS(ASCP), is the Founder and Executive Director of PCOS Challenge: The National Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Association, where she leads national and international efforts to advance PCOS care, research, and policy. She spearheads engagement with the U.S. Congress, FDA, CDC, and NIH to drive patient-focused medical product development, hormone testing standardization, and trans-NIH collaboration on PCOS research. Sasha played a pivotal role in establishing the Bipartisan Congressional PCOS Caucus and helped drive the first successful U.S. legislative effort for PCOS. She also directs the only U.S. patient-focused medical product development initiative for PCOS and serves as Co-Principal Investigator of the PCOS Challenge Study, a patient-powered registry generating real-world evidence on quality of life, health status, and economic burden.

Under her leadership, PCOS Challenge serves nearly 60,000 members and has educated thousands of patients and healthcare professionals on PCOS through its symposia since 2013. She also founded World PCOS Day and leads collaborative initiatives to align research, policy, and clinical practice. Her work focuses on advancing patient-centered research and interagency collaboration to close critical knowledge gaps, improve treatment development, and strengthen systems of care for people with PCOS.

Sasha and PCOS Challenge have been engaged in the broader PCOS naming discussion for nearly a decade, including a peer-reviewed correspondence on the recent PCOS-to-PMOS renaming process published in The Lancet in July 2026. PCOS Challenge helps stakeholders navigate the asymmetric adoption, impacts, and opportunities of PCOS and PMOS terminology across patient, clinical, research, and regulatory contexts.

Sasha is a co-author on the international evidence-based guideline for the assessment and management of PCOS and on peer-reviewed research published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Fertility and Sterility, and eLife, among others. She has also authored chapters in reference works on PCOS published by Routledge and SAGE and was an invited Grand Rounds presenter at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Sasha is a Clinical and Research Microbiologist with a Bachelor’s degree in Clinical Laboratory Science from Howard University and a Master’s in Health Administration from the University of Phoenix.