Hi! My name is Sara, and I live in the Pacific Northwest. I work as a journalist reporting on Washington state politics, focusing on health and education policy. Before that, I worked as a health news reporter with an award-winning team at The Tribune in San Luis Obispo, CA, and as a freelance reporter in the East Bay Area.
I also work as a freelance writer and editor creating content for health, science, and technology companies that do not conflict with my journalism work.
I have about 10 years of experience writing about health, science, and technology where I routinely collaborated with technical experts to produce accurate and compelling content in service of our readers. I do not need preexisting knowledge on a topic to write about it accurately because my research and reporting skills help me ask the right questions, and summarize my findings.
As a journalist, I routinely juggle multiple writing projects and deliver high-quality content under tight deadlines. I am committed to accuracy and consistency in my work and operate with speed, efficiency, and a strong attention to detail. I am a team player who is always ready to collaborate on projects and I try to stay organized by maintaining a comprehensive and updated editorial calendar.
Before returning to journalism, I spent about three years working in tech. While at GitLab, I worked on the GitLab Blogs team as a content editor, which published stories for and about the developer community. Unlike my fluency in healthcare topics, I had no prior software engineering experience before joining GitLab. I still managed to successfully distill complex engineering topics into readable and technically sound content for our readers. I am familiar with many different CMS systems, but we used the GitLab DevOps platform to take blog posts from pitch to published using code. My job as a blog editor involved interviewing subject matter experts at GitLab, watching technical tutorials, synthesizing ideas, and explaining how to use GitLab in creative and interesting ways. I was also tasked with editing content submitted by our engineers to make the copy readable for our developer audience and consistent with our team's style standards.
Before working in tech, I spent about four years working in global health research and science communications. After graduating with my MS from UCSF's Institute of Global Health Science, I published a peer-reviewed study that investigated how stakeholders prioritize preterm birth alongside other pressing maternal and child health challenges. While at UCSF and after graduating, I worked as a social media and communications manager at the Public Library of Science (PLOS), where my job was to engage our broad researcher community in conversation using social media (e.g., Twitter, redditscience) and to showcase our research through articles, press releases, social media posts, podcasts, blog posts, and more. I repackaged scientific research into material that was accessible to readers across disciplines—meaning a neuroscientist could read about paleontology research summarized in a blog post written by me and get the gist of the research.
I love learning about new and interesting topics and writing content that serves the information needs of a particular audience. Contact me if you have a project in mind that I could contribute to! References are available upon request.