Sarah Sheard has had a long career treading edges and boundaries. She started graduate school at California Institute of Technology in the chemistry department and then signed up with an advisor in the chemical engineering department.  After teaching at the secondary school level for 2 years, she became a satellite systems engineer at Hughes Aircraft Company, where she trod the boundary between the old-boy’s network actively trying to put a “pretty girl” out of a “place like engineering” and a growing high-tech environment needing all enthusiastic talent. She also dipped her toes into project and then line management, moving the company into the “Theory Y” type of participative management in the early 1990s, before moving from the west coast to the east coast.  At IBM Federal Systems, she jumped at a chance to learn software just as the Internet was taking off, on the ultra-complex FAA Advanced Automation System.  Working systems engineering, she worked to get the organization to define systems and software engineering processes in a usable manner.  Later she spent ten years treading the lines between systems and software, between technology and process, and between doing and consulting at the Software Productivity Consortium, which evolved to the Systems and Software Consortium during her tenure.  She then created her own consulting company while working on her PhD in complexity and systems engineering, which was granted by Stevens Institute of Technology in 2012.   She then worked at the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University as a systems engineer, at the edge of new technological advances whether safety and complexity for the FAA or artificial intelligence and systems engineering for military customers.  Since 1992 she has been a member, then a Fellow, of the International Council on Systems Engineering, where she has continued to serve as the head of the Systems and Software Interface Working Group since her retirement in late 2019.  Her group’s project to jointly read the book “Systems Engineering of Software Enabled Systems” by Richard E. Fairley was fortuitously timed to start just as the global pandemic shut down most workplaces. This allowed two dozen systems engineers to continue contributing to resolving the systems-software interface from their homes.  Some of Dr. Sheard’s more famous systems engineering publications include Principles of Complex Systems for Systems Engineering, and Twelve Systems Engineering Roles, and the Frameworks Quagmire.