Immediately after graduating from her undergraduate program at Yale, Sterling worked for the
San Diego Zoo and the
World Wildlife Fund, where she first became interested in the aye-aye. Throughout the 1990s, she served as a trainer and consultant for the Peace Corps for several years, primarily working in Madagascar and
Comoros. She was a visiting researcher at
Duke University in 1992 and at the American Museum of Natural History in 1993, where she would return in 1996 as a Program Director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC). In 2000, she became the director of the CBC. From 2014 to 2021, Sterling served as the Jaffe Chief Conservation Scientist at the museum, where her work spanned the globe, including countries like
Bolivia,
Vietnam, and
The Bahamas. While at the AMNH, she founded the
Network of Conservation Educators and Practitioners, mentored students in the
Richard Gilder Graduate School, and curated five exhibitions on topics such as global food systems,
Pinta Island tortoises, and China's
Yunnan Province. She also founded the New York Women in Natural Sciences Chapter of the
Association for Women in Sciences, where she helped develop the Untold Stories in Conservation and Natural History project to highlight underrepresented individuals in the field. Sterling was also a founding member of the Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology Department at
Columbia University, and served as an adjunct professor there as well as the Director of Graduate Studies from 2002 to 2012. Sterling's early work on the aye-aye established her as a leading expert on the species, and her later research focused on the behavioral ecology of endangered species, including
sea turtles in the
Palmyra Atoll and
Giant Galápagos Tortoises. Sterling was involved with the
International Union for Conservation of Nature and Nature Resources (IUCN), most notably serving as the deputy vice chair of the
World Commission on Protected Areas, where she helped to develop a Strategic Framework for Capacity Development. From 2018 to 2022, she also served on the Board of Directors of
Island Conservation, and as chair of the diversity, equity, and inclusion committee. In 2022, she became the director of the
Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology at the
University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. After her death in 2023, her friends established a fund for the institute in her honor. == Personal life and death ==