Sarah Lovell

Sarah Lovell is a captain and a cyber warfare officer with the Maryland Air National Guard's 175th Cyberspace Operations Squadron out of Fort Meade, MD. Prior to joining the military, Sarah worked for two years as a contracted field engineer for the Department of Defense Tactical Biometrics Systems in Iraq and Afghanistan preparing biometric access badges for local workers, including time with Special Operations Command where she was flown to combat locations to collect DNA to identify soldiers killed by IED bomb blasts.

Sarah spent nearly a decade as a public policy researcher at RAND—a federally funded research and development center—and is now a Security Engineering Officer with the US State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Sarah holds a Masters in Technology Policy from the University of Cambridge and is a 2007 WVU Lane Department graduate in computer engineering and biometric systems.

Sarah has supported WVU by endowing the Wils Cooley Study Abroad Engineering Scholarship, which so far has supported 13 students. She has visited freshman engineering classes numerous times to promote study abroad and was the keynote speaker at the WVU Honors Convocation in 2019. She has been active in advocating for minorities and women for careers in national security. She has a keen interest in ethical and public policy considerations surrounding biometrics and cyber security, such as who should have access to key data and for what purposes.