Her Story
About Sarah
My career has been driven by a deep commitment to advocacy and care for vulnerable populations. I started at NYU studying child psychology with a focus on child and adolescent mental health, working in research labs with Jason Babel and Joshua Ahrens on projects centered on social justice and mindfulness with underprivileged and neurodivergent youth. That hands-on classroom experience led me to work as a teacher assistant at Learning Spring School with children with moderate to high-functioning autism, focusing on life skills and academics. I then moved into the corporate world, working for a language service provider in pharmacovigilance, managing clinical trial translations for pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna, CROs, and major institutions like NIH. I learned extensively about the regulatory process for drug approval and worked directly on translating the COVID vaccine for Moderna across multiple countries. At one point, as a young professional, I was managing accounts grossing over $3 million, translating over a million words a day for major Medicare providers like Centene and WellCare. I helped create an innovative workflow system using translation memory to get critical healthcare letters to patients in 24 hours. After experiencing constant mismanagement in the corporate world, I decided to invest in my own success and returned to NYU's Stern School of Business to pursue my MBA with a specialty in economics and healthcare. Now I work for an NGO that provides residential services to adults with developmental disabilities in New York State. As a residential coordinator with 20 direct reports, I advocate for individuals with autism, Down syndrome, and other conditions who need guardianship and can't live on their own. My days involve managing medications, coordinating with medical teams and therapists, responding to mental health crises, ensuring compliance with state audits, and fighting to make sure everyone gets the care they're entitled to. It's a constant challenge, but my first priority is always the person.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Sarah
01What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think everything is a fight. There are so many people involved, so many hands in every pot, just like regulations and bureaucracy and red tape. Obviously, nonprofits don't have a whole lot of money, so that can make things a little bit difficult. To me, you can't quantify quality of life from an economics perspective. You can't put a price on somebody's mental health. You can't put a price on the assurance for me that somebody is safe. If I go home at the end of the day and I'm worried about somebody, how many years is that taking off my life? I think the biggest challenge is just trying to celebrate the small wins, because everything is a fight. So, having somebody say yes to something is a win, even if it doesn't happen the same day. Keeping everything in perspective while also just practicing patience and mindfulness. In the meantime, until I can get somebody into an inpatient program, how do I make sure they're safe? How do I pace myself through those days and say, okay, just a couple more days, and then it'll be fine, and they'll get everything they need? That's hard.
Join Influential Women and start making an impact. Register now.