Sarah Leinicke

About

Sarah Leinicke joined the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University as Lead Technical Project Manager in June 2024. In this role, Sarah assembles and coordinates project teams, ensures successful resource allocation and timely project completion, and facilitates communication between engineers, researchers, and other stakeholders. She also oversees the AI Engineering Internship Program.

Sarah’s background spans technical and project management roles in research software engineering and in the private sector. She previously served as a Senior Research Software Engineer for the Faculty of Arts & Sciences Researching Computing at Harvard University, where she was the lead full-stack software engineer for a neuroscience research web application. Before coming to Harvard, Sarah worked at the Software Application & Innovation Lab at Boston University. She designed and developed full-stack software solutions to support research projects across a range of domains, from public health to synthetic biology. She also managed relationships with principal investigators and supervised interns. Sarah has presented at national research software engineering conferences, including those hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the US Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE). In addition to her academic experience, Sarah was a systems engineer at Draper Laboratory and supported a big data cybersecurity application at Parsons Corporation. Sarah was an attorney before transitioning to software engineering. She worked with the Office of Administrative Law Judges at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Sarah earned a Master’s in software engineering and a data science certificate from Harvard Extension, a JD from American University, and a BA from Smith College.