“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
Sarah Gulliford (née Kearns) is driven by her curiosity, community-driven orientation, and systems-level thinking. 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 open scholarship, ecological sustainability, folk traditions, and media.
Sarah likes to uncover and share nuanced, and thought-provoking stories that weave different strands of ideas together yet kalidescopically. For her, this comes in the form of creative non-fiction writing: she loves the power of the written word, and thinks its documentation serves as a resource that easily archived and retrieved. Because of her scientific training, much of her writing orbits around the methodological study of the natural world, and she aims to have each piece spark in the reader a take-away idea or, better yet, a question to ponder. She has been the editor of two digital publications and one print magazine. Over the past few years, she started getting into podcasting and is actively 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. Her most recent role was in scholarly publishing as the Community Strategist of Knowledge Futures. She loves scholarship and academia for it’s long-standing traditions of pursuing an understanding of Nature and Being, and recognizes the practices and rituals around it need to be more inclusive and accessible.
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 the great state of New York with her husband and son where she plays around with fermentation, photography, foraging, and old-time music.
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.
Inspiration
“To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.” ~REBECCA SOLNIT
“I will keep my soul soft with love and community. I will keep my ancestors close at my back. I will wear all their prayers of love and of freedom as a cloak around me. I will weave myself into a community who hold the same values, the same desire for the world; one of peace and freedom. A community which dares to dream outside of the confines of the capitalist, colonial complex. A community who has “gone native”, who is more invested in our ties to the earth and each other than individual profit and ease. I will envisage a different future for this world, I will make it anew, as often as I need to. I have nailed my colours to the mast, and I trust I will find myself surrounded by those whose hearts align with mine.” ~SIOBHÁN RODGERS