In 1996, Sullivan and two fellow university seniors expanded a class assignment[3] that ultimately freed four men (Ford Heights Four) who had been wrongfully convicted of a 1978 murder in Chicago's South Side; two were death-row inmates.

[1][5] Sullivan wrote about the project, which won a special citation from Investigative Reporters and Editors,[6] in an essay for the Sunday June 27, 1999 edition of the Baltimore Sun.

In addition to her second Peabody and duPont, the series was also honored by the Scripps Howard Foundation,[15] the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government[16] and the American Bar Association.

Prior to this, Sullivan had worked on other investigations in disasters[26] into the American Red Cross delving into the charity's finances and its performance after the Haiti earthquake and Hurricane Sandy.

Those stories were honored with Sullivan's second Goldsmith Award[27] from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and her third commendation[28] from Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Sullivan continued to collaborate with Frontline as a correspondent on five more films, Poverty, Politics and Profit,[29] which examined the billions spent housing the poor, and Blackout in Puerto Rico,[30] which investigated the federal response, Wall Street and years of neglect on the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria.