Sarah Rieth earns universitywide Outstanding Faculty RSCA Award
While in graduate school, Sarah Rieth suspected that becoming a university researcher was not the path for her. The gap between the work and actually making an impact in people’s lives, she lamented, was just too great.
Then, she discovered the joys of implementation science.
"It turns out, there are real questions that we can answer and things we can study in a scientific and systematic way — and with that knowledge we can immediately, or at least relatively quickly, impact people's lives," says Rieth, now an associate professor at San Diego State University who studies the delivery of interventions and services for children with developmental disabilities and their families.
Now in her 10th year on faculty in the Department of Child and Family Development, Rieth and her impact have garnered recognition from the wider SDSU research community.
Rieth has been named the Public Impact awardee for the 2025 SDSU Outstanding Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (RSCA) Awards. She will receive the honor during the annual Albert W. Johnson Award Ceremony on March 12.
Rieth is one of several COE investigators who are part of the Child & Adolescent Services Research Center (CASRC), a multi-institutional consortium working to improve health and developmental services for children and families.
In partnership with the San Diego Regional Center (SDRC) and the BRIDGE Collaborative — a network of providers, researchers, funding agencies, and parents — Rieth has spearheaded building community capacity for an evidenced-based intervention for families of young children with autism. Known as Project ImPACT for Toddlers, the intervention coaches parents on social communication strategies they can use to further their child’s development.
“I think it has really changed the service landscape here in San Diego,” Rieth said of Project ImPACT. “The anecdotal stories that we’re getting say it really is helping parents be more equipped for the services to come. They’re being made a partner from the beginning in the first service that they receive and that helps them be engaged and informed in navigating their child’s individual journey moving forward."
Rieth and SDRC have also teamed up to address spending disparities that indicate non-Hispanic white families are accessing services at a higher rate than Latine families. The major factors, they discovered, were issues of trust, power differential and cultural and linguistic barriers.
Working closely with SDRC Cultural Specialist Brenda Bello Vazquez and team, Rieth helped implement a promotora approach, where mentor parents from the Latine community who have successfully navigated services for their children are paired up with new parents seeking services for the first time.
“They take the parent through a curriculum of understanding developmental disabilities, supporting their child’s needs, building social support and dealing with stress and depression,” Rieth said. “It’s important for them to have somebody that shares their values and experiences to talk through those decisions with.”
As she prepares to receive the award, Rieth expressed gratitude to her partners at SDRC, her mentors and colleagues at CASRC, the BRIDGE Collaborative and the CFD department. And most of all, she’s happy to spotlight the work they all do to make an immediate impact.
“I’m excited about the developmental disability community being highlighted, and just children’s services in general,” Rieth said of the award. “There are so many people out there working hard to support children and families. The more attention this gets, hopefully the resources follow, because this work is really worth it."
