Sara grew up in Pleasant Ridge, Michigan, back when local residents could still hear the Detroit Zoo lions roaring on the other side of Ten Mile.* From her earliest days, she loved to read; among her favorite books were The Wizard of Oz, Are You My Mother?, and anything from the Serendipity series. 

Sara majored in English at the University of Michigan, where she went on to earn an MFA in creative writing. She spent ten years teaching writing classes, including creative nonfiction, at U-M. During this time, she developed a love of English grammar and punctuation, particularly the em dash and the Oxford comma. Sara also became increasingly interested in science; she enrolled in a local community college to better understand the fundamentals of microbiology, chemistry, and anatomy. Naturally, she started to write about them too.

For her first commissioned journalism assignment, published in 2016, Sara traveled to Tennessee, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to report on Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities and their sometimes fraught relationship with the modern healthcare system. Since then, Sara has reported on a wide range of science-related topics, including artificial wombs, energy drinks, concierge medicine, and PFAS contamination in west Michigan. She is now a contributing editor at Undark. Sara lives in Michigan with her husband, children, and beagle.