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Sarah works to create awareness and programs that encourage more women to enter a computing pathway and persist into computing majors and careers. In 2016, she was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Inclusion Across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science grant (NSF INCLUDES 1649312), through which she created the Mississippi Alliance for Women in Computing.

Sarah has served on numerous graduate student committees and as the major advisor for masters level graduate students. Her doctoral students are studying computer science and engineering education, with particular focus on artificial intelligence, cyber security, and parallel computing.

Sarah collaborated with researchers in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education department of the MSU College of Education in the study of approaches to bringing computing and cybersecurity into K-12 classrooms in Mississippi. This collaborative team, through pre-service and in-service teacher education, studied the most effective ways to teach computational thinking in ALL K-12 classrooms.

Sarah has worked to disseminate knowledge gained through her outreach/teaching/research activities, including the use of robotics to teach computational thinking and cybersecurity concepts, throughout the engineering and computer science education communities: