Sandra Elisabeth Roelofs was born on December 23, 1968 in Terneuzen, the Netherlands.

In 1991 Sandra E. Roelofs graduated with honors from the State Economic Institute for Translators and Interpreters, Brussels, majoring in French and German. She met the Georgian lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili in 1993 while attending a course on human rights in Strasbourg and later that year moved to New York where they got married. Sandra worked both at Columbia University and a Dutch law firm.

In 1996 the couple returned to Georgia, where Sandra E. Roelofs worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Her husband became the President of Georgia in January 2004.