She earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Adelaide, where she studied anticonvulsant drugs in immunosuppression.

[2] Sorrell studies the pathogenesis of invasive fungal infections, drug discovery and translational research.

She has studied the virulence determinants in Cryptococcus neoformans in an effort to identify novel treatments and rapid diagnostics tests.

She has designed a novel PCR platform for the rapid screening of DNA and RNA from up to 70 micro-organisms at the same time, which can speed up clinical diagnostics.

[6] Sorrell helped to establish the University of Sydney's Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity.