She graduated from Carleton College in 1986 with a degree in biology and earned her Ph.D. in 1995 from the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1998, she joined the faculty of the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a Resident Fellow of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment[4] and is involved in undergraduate writing across the curriculum programming and in graduate education leadership.

Sarah is particularly interested on global change, and she aims to understand how anthropogenic effects affect the carbon cycle; how biodiversity, atmospheric carbon dioxide, nitrogen, rainfall, and increases in temperatures influence grassland ecosystems; and how increases in temperature alter community and ecosystem processes at the southern boreal-temperate forest ecotone.

Her and her team focus on quantifying resources of nutrient pollutants to subwatersheds of the Mississippi River and how nutrients move from the land to the stormwater[5] She is active in the National Science Foundation's Long Term Ecological Research program (LTER), with ongoing research at the Cedar Creek LTER site in central Minnesota.

She has served on the LTER Executive Board, on the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis Science Advisory Board, on NSF review panels, and contributed to a report for the Minnesota State Legislature evaluating the potential for the State’s terrestrial ecosystems to sequester carbon.