Mobility Matters—April 2026

Get To Know Our Team: Sarah Hipel

A conversation with Sarah Hipel, who leads NLR's mobility cybersecurity strategy.

What does your work focus on?

My work focuses on the intersection of mobility, energy systems, and cybersecurity. As transportation and energy infrastructure become increasingly connected, software-defined, and digitally orchestrated, the reliability of these systems depends not just on physical engineering but on the integrity of the digital infrastructure that supports them.

At NLR, I focus on developing the technical and institutional frameworks needed to make this transition secure and interoperable. This includes advancing cybersecurity approaches for grid-connected infrastructure, supporting open standards that allow devices and systems to communicate reliably, and creating environments where industry and researchers can test and validate these technologies together. Much of my work sits at the boundary between research, standards development, and industry collaboration, with the goal of ensuring that emerging mobility systems are secure, resilient, and capable of scaling globally.

What single mobility challenge would you say will come to the forefront in the next 5 years?

The biggest challenge will be securing the rapidly expanding digital layer of mobility infrastructure. Vehicles, infrastructure, grid services, and connected transportation networks are becoming deeply integrated with software, cloud services, and real-time communications.

Over the next 5 years, the scale of these systems will increase dramatically, and with that scale comes new risks. Devices that were once isolated are now part of complex cyber-physical ecosystems. Ensuring that these systems can communicate securely, authenticate each other, and operate reliably across many different vendors and networks will be critical. Addressing this challenge requires coordinated standards, trusted digital infrastructure, and large-scale testing environments that allow us to validate how these systems behave in the real world.

Can you share a defining moment in your research career?

A defining moment in my career came when I began working directly at the intersection of industry, standards bodies, and public research institutions. I realized that many of the challenges slowing the deployment of advanced mobility systems were not purely technical, but were coordination problems between organizations, standards, and implementation environments.

Seeing how small technical decisions in standards or architecture could influence entire industries fundamentally changed how I approached research. Instead of focusing only on individual technologies, I began thinking about the broader systems that enable innovation to scale, such as sharing testing environments requiring pre-competitive collaboration and open standards ecosystems. That shift has shaped much of the work I do today.

What piece of research are you most proud of conducting?

The work I'm most proud of is helping shape approaches that connect security with the physical operation of energy and mobility infrastructure. Traditionally, these domains have been addressed separately: Cybersecurity teams focus on networks and software, while engineers focus on the physics of power systems and devices.

Bringing those perspectives together so that digital security controls can be validated against physical system behavior has been an exciting area of work. It opens the door to new ways of detecting and preventing threats in complex cyber-physical systems like charging networks and grid-connected infrastructure. Contributing to this emerging field and helping create environments where researchers and industry can validate these ideas at scale has been particularly meaningful.