Sarah Madden (that's me) is a design-researcher and technologist with extensive experience in the government and non-profit sectors.

How'd I get here?

I am dedicated to understanding and designing systems that serve others. I care about doing work that has an impact, which has led me through designing algebra curriculum, studying how policy gets made, a stint as an urban planner, joining the nonprofit sector, and finally spending the last six+ years in gov tech.

I have held a variety of individual contributor, design manager, and leadership roles along the way. I am an applied problem solver at my core and love finding elegant paths in complex systems.

Current work

I work at Trussworks, a consultancy focused on making government services work better for ordinary people. Currently I am the project lead / Program Manager defining and executing a modernization strategy for the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) at HRSA.

Other government clients I've worked with include the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM). I've also served as manager and sponsor for teammates working with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Office of Head Start (OHS), and U.S. Space Force.

Past lives

Previously, I led design at GuideStar, where we published data about nonprofits, and I worked with a distributed software team to launch web applications and products. Before that I designed educuational web applications at WestEd, a non-profit research, development, and service agency. Before that, I facilitated strategic planning and developed interactive tools for campus and municipal clients across the United States at Sasaki.

Long ago, I was a graduate student researcher at MIT, where I studied the process by which cities adopted (or didn't adopt) new policies to support sustainability, and a designer and educational researcher in the STEM group at WestEd, where I managed experimental design studies and designed algebra curriculum. To keep my chops fresh, I've sustained a freelance design practice for about a decade, designing brand identities, interactive applications, print publications, and a handful of food trucks. My food truck designs caught the eye of Communication Arts in 2013.

On the academic front, I hold a Master of City Planning (M.C.P.) from MIT (focus area: Environmental Policy and Planning), plus a B.A. in Linguistics and a B.S. in interdisciplinary environmental sciences (from a program in which the College of Natural Resources graciously allows students to propose an individualized course of study) from the University of California, Berkeley.

I’m based in Maine.