Sara is Director of Research at the Serious Games Institute at the University of Coventry where she leads an applied research team working closely with industry. Appointed Professor of Virtual Environments, she holds a visiting senior research fellowship at the London Knowledge Lab, London, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

In 2003 Sara founded (and continues to Chair) the UK Lab Group, which brings the research and development community together to create stronger links between industrial and academic research through supporting collaborative programmes and for showcasing innovative R&D solutions for the knowledge economy.

Voted the Most Influential Woman in Technology 2009 and 2010 by US Fast Company, Sara chairs the IEEE Serious Games and Virtual Worlds conferences (VS-Games), and is a regular speaker at international conferences. Sara currently holds funding from the Advantage West Midlands, Erasmus Scheme, European Regional Development Fund and European Union. Her current lines of research are examining multimodal interfaces, experience design and perceptual modelling in games and virtual worlds towards developing the next generation of intelligent tutoring environments.

Sara publishes widely in the areas of: pedagogy and e-learning; change management and strategy development for implementing e-learning systems and serious games and virtual worlds for supporting training and learning. She is the author of the reports “Learning in Immersive Worlds” and “Serious Virtual Worlds”. Her most recent book Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age (edited with R. Sharpe and H. Beetham) was published by Routledge. Her forthcoming book Digital Games and Learning (edited with P. Maharg), published by Continuum Press, is due out in early 2011.