Professor Jonathan Sandy

Jonathan is an Emeritus Professor in Orthodontics, University of Bristol.

His dental training was in London (Kings College Hospital, The London Hospital and the Eastman).

Jonathan was awarded an MRC Training Fellowship and after his PhD was MRC funded as a postdoctoral scientist for two years in the Biochemistry Department, University of Cambridge.

He was appointed to University of Bristol as a Consultant Senior Lecturer in 1991, promoted to a Reader in 1997 and awarded a Personal Chair in 1999.  He was head of the Dental School 2007-2014 and then appointed as the inaugural Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences comprising Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Sciences until 2019.

Jonathan’s main research interests are in cleft lip and palate. 

In 1996 he was appointed to co- lead the research for the Clinical Standards Advisory Group (CSAG) which provided the evidence to change a dispersed model of care for children born with a cleft to a centralised model.  The 57 cleft centres operating in 1996 were slowly reduced to 11 Managed Clinical Networks.  Jonathan was a member of all the implementation committees to change this care pathway.  Jonathan supported the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) funded programme, Cleft Care UK, evaluating the impact of the centralisation of cleft services following the recommendations made by CSAG in 1998.  In 2012 the Cleft Collective was launched.  This was a large joint research programme, funded by the Healing Foundation between The University of the West of England and University of Bristol for children born with cleft and their families.  Jonathan was the Principal Investigator until he retired in 2020.

He has co-authored three books and has over 300 peer-reviewed publications.