Sarah Bentley, MPH

Research Coordinator II
[email protected]

Sarah S. Bentley, MPH the project director for the STREETS Study (Safe TRavel Environment Evaluation in Texas Schools). She joined the Center as a Graduate Research Assistant in 2015 providing faculty support for grants and manuscripts, as well as serving as project manager for the Center’s School Stakeholder Interview Project. In 2017, she was hired as full-time staff on the Texas SNAP-Ed: Evaluating Impact project, where she focused on logic model development, advisory committee duties, evaluation, needs assessment, qualitative analysis, and report writing. In 2018, Sarah became the project director for the STREETS study, a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded project to evaluate the City of Austin’s Safe Routes to School (SRTS) initiative. She also teaches wellness classes (qigong and meditation) at the Center for faculty, staff, and students.

Before working at the Center, Sarah was the director of community relations at AOMA Graduate School of Integrative Medicine for 10 years. She earned her undergraduate degrees from the University of Texas at Austin in Anthropology and Spanish. Sarah received her MPH in Health Promotion & Behavioral Sciences from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health in Austin. During her MPH program, Sarah worked at Foundation Communities as the project manager for the Afterschool Physical Activity Evaluation project and the Healthy Food Pantry project. 

When not at work, Sarah enjoys being physically active, gardening, cooking, and spending time with her family.

Current Projects

Nourishing the Community Through Culinary Medicine

Nourishing the Community Through Culinary Medicine is a study to pilot test a virtual culinary medicine program with adults with uncontrolled type 2 diabetes. The purpose of this study is to see how well synchronous but virtual hands-on healthy cooking classes work to help patients with diabetes improve cooking skills, change eating habits and control diabetes. All materials for this project, including our toolkit and recorded classes are available on the Nourish website.

STREETS (Safe TRavel Environment Evaluation in Texas Schools)

The STREETS Study (Safe TRavel Environment Evaluation in Texas Schools) is a five-year (2018 – 2023) natural experiment that is evaluating the City of Austin Safe Routes to School program.

Texas SNAP-Ed Evaluation

Texas SNAP-Ed Evaluation, is a two-year project to evaluate, on a statewide basis, the effectiveness of SNAP-Ed nutrition education and obesity prevention programming activities delivered by Implementing Agencies throughout the state of Texas.