Throughout her career Sarah has held several leadership positions including Programme Director Business Management and School Director of Transnational Education. Prior to working in academia, she worked in retail at a senior management level. Sarah’s teaching is heavily influenced by her industry practice and through this, she delivers engaging industry relevant teaching and authentic assessments via an experiential learning approach. Her work on authentic assessments has been widely published internationally and she supports others to develop their own authentic assessments.
In 2023, Sarah was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship for her performance in teaching, design, and leadership and her work on digital learning.
Her pedagogical research interests are primarily around how industry practice can be reflected in assessments, digital education and graduate employability skill development. Sarah’s academic area of research is retail and consumer behaviour. She is particularly interested in understanding the role of retail in creating community 3rd places. She is an engaging and skilled communicator and regularly appears in the media on the subject of retail industry change. She writes for the College Blog and the BBC website and often appears on the BBC news and radio channels to talk about a range of retail subjects such as Cyber Monday.