“Everyone of us, and every group with which we live and work, must become the model of the era which we desire to create.” ~IVAN ILLICH
I am available for part-time or project-based work! My extensive experience in scientific research and editing (managing, content, and copy) across many fields of scholarship makes me highly qualified to write, edit, and consult collaboratively with you for your project. Check out my CV and Resume on LinkedIn.
Sarah Gulliford (née Kearns) is driven by her curiosity, focus on community stewardship, and systems-level thinking. She likes to uncover and share nuanced, and thought-provoking stories that weave different strands of ideas together yet kaleidoscopically. For Sarah, this comes in the form of creative non-fiction writing. Because of her scientific training, much of her writing orbits around the methodological study of the natural world. She has been the editor of two digital publications and one print magazine, and she’s exploring other forms of media and design that encourage community engagement.
Sarah earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan’s Chemical Biology where she experimented with microscopes to study cellular roads and learned dedication, how to ask meaningful questions, and find knowledge in mistakes and successes alike. She is currently the Community Operations Manager at Experiment, a crowd-funding platform for scientific research, where she reviews new projects creates outreach campaigns, and is a freelance writer and editor.
She thrives in new or transitioning work environments with scrappy organizations that are open to experimenting with philosophies and praxis given her experience in newly established labs, projects, and non-profits. Her interests center around structural and cellular biology, open scholarship, ecological sustainability, and media. Sarah grew up on the coast of Maine with her parents and younger sister and now lives on a homestead in the Southern Tier region of New York with her husband and two boys, where she experiments with fermentation and photography.
Past Experience
Community Strategist, Knowledge Futures. Maintained partnerships, lead outreach, and coordinated programming. She worked with a myriad of academic institutions to establish journals, create open education resources, publish books digitally, and helped co-create innovative ways to publish and conduct peer review. She also created and ran Community Spotlights showcasing the stories and work by organizations using KF’s infrastructure and the PubPub Crawl events that brought communities working on similar topics together to collaborate. Sarah finds a lot of inspiration in amplifying the works of others.
Managing Editor, Commonplace. Sarah was hired on in 2021 to manage Knowledge Futures’ publication space and up until mid-2024 she was responsible for acquisitions, managing the editorial calendar, special series management, branding, and copy-editing most pieces published. She really enjoyed curating a space that engaged a wide range of different ideas around scholarly publishing and loved working with authors to make their statements and voices shine.
Editor-in-Chief, Michigan Science Writers and EquilibriUM. During graduate school, Sarah joined Michigan Science Writers and within two years became the editor-in-chief. In this role, she established clear editorial and style guides that helped writers and editors become better writers and editors. She also spear-headed and designed a print magazine, EquilibriUM, in 2020 that focused on STEAMM (science, technology, engineering, art, math, and medicine)-related topics. Sarah enjoys being a part of new projects, creating guides that encourage creativity while setting clear expectations, and sharing ideas with larger communities and audiences.
Communicating Science Conference, Michigan. Sarah was the Organizing Chair of the first-ever ComSciCon Michigan conference in 2018, a graduate-student run weekend workshop series organized by graduate students, for graduate students, focused on science communication skills. Experiencing a void of sci-comm networking and training in the midwest, she created an engaging conference that brought folks from all over the state of Michigan, chose the programming of talented speakers and workshop hosts, and managed the finances. The following two years, she was the financial coordinator and a workshop leader, respectively. Though a strong introvert, Sarah loves bringing the right groups of people together (so called, “critical yeast”) to enact spaces of learning and critical thinking.
Graduate Student, Life Science Institute at the University of Michigan. For her thesis, Sarah used microscopes great (cryoEM) and small (fluorescence) to study the “road signs of the cell” (a.k.a. “microtubule post-translational modifications”) under the mentorship of Drs Michael Cianfrocco and Kristen Verhey. She focused on one particular road sign, called methylation, and determined how the enzyme that “builds” the sign recognizes where to do so, and how mutations in that enzyme found in kidney cancer patients mess up its functionality. This research, along with a few other projects, lead to a handful of academic papers, some being first authored by Sarah. Being co-mentored by a brand new professor and an established tenured faculty member taught her to establish best laboratory practices and day-to-day culture, work collaboratively, and ask viable and cutting edge research questions.