Biography

Assistant Teaching Professor Sara Sanford has focused her career on harnessing the knowledge in information to drive meaningful action. As an educator and mentor, she is committed to helping others discover the tools to do the same.

Sara’s interdisciplinary approach to furthering the iSchool’s mission focuses on matching vision with practicality. She is passionate about leveraging data to eradicate inequities in employee and customer experiences, public policy and product design. In the classroom and in her research, she expands on these areas to focus on the societal impacts of research design, the role of sustainability in product development lifecycles, and the intersection of bias, ethics, and scaled AI.

She is most excited about helping students learn the skills that transform them into true information leaders. With years of applied, strategic leadership experience, Sara looks forward to helping students learn to persuasively articulate their vision, evaluate and mitigate risk, and value research-driven decision-making.

In addition to facilitating a meaningful Program/Product Management & Consulting specialization experience for MSIM students, Sara will also contribute to the iSchool’s growing focus on people analytics. As a consultant, she has partnered with clients to audit their algorithms for bias, develop intersectional frameworks for their People Analytics’ teams, and optimize their product development processes with inclusive customer journey frameworks. She also authored “Inclusion, Inc: How to Design Intersectional Equity into the Workplace,” released by Wiley in May 2022.