She spent a year working on excavations and then completed her PhD at the University of Nottingham on the Roman and Early Christian Mosaics of Crete.
[4] She was the assistant director of the British School at Athens from 2000 to 2003 and then moved to the University of St Andrews as a lecturer in Ancient History and Archaeology in 2003.
[5][6] She gave her inaugural lecture as professor on 25 September 2019 with a talk entitled 'Resilience in the Wine Dark Sea: the archaeology of Roman Crete and the Cyclades'.
[8][9] In 2015, Sweetman was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Fellowship for the project ‘The Roman and Late Antique Cyclades: Networks, Economy and Religion’.
[14] Between January and February 2019 she swam in the North Sea 28 times in order to raise money for refugees in Athens.