Our Team
Sarah Ahrens
Founder + Chief Executive Officer
Sarah has extensive experience in enterprise and consultative sales for both products and services, both as an individual contributor and as a leader, and acting as an entrepreneur throughout. Her career in sales has spanned nearly 20 years and her success has resulted in numerous awards and accolades. Sarah has consulted global organizations on operational improvements and helped enable customer experience transformations. She has a passion for transparency and enabling clients to be successful.
Sarah has lived in New Jersey for over 20 years, where she and her husband are raising their two daughters (currently 8 and 6). She is passionate about eating healthy, consuming organic and clean foods, diligently reading ingredient labels, and ensuring she purchases the best quality food products for her family. This passion is a big part of why Sarah chose to start True Labs for Cannabis, since the scientific analytical testing of cannabis will provide consumers with the transparency they need in order to feel safe about the cannabis products they put in their bodies. As a caring, compassionate mother, it is no coincidence that Sarah chose to name the company based on the “TLC” acronym, which is commonly known as “tender loving care”. Sarah has always had a fascination for science and the technology and innovation that advances it. She is deeply committed to the integrity behind what True Labs stands for, and is also dedicated to helping to build and enhance the credibility for the entire legal cannabis testing industry.
Carl Christianson, Ph.D.
Chief Science Officer
Carl is a highly skilled scientist who has been advocating for cannabis legalization for over seven years. He was an early advocate for the movement for legalization in the state of Vermont, became a founding member of the Vermont Cannabis Association, and started the news site called Vermont Cannabis News. During his advocacy work and interacting with politicians, start-up businesses, and farmers, Carl identified a lack of quality processing and testing services for the hemp industry in the region. So, he started Northeast Processing – a premier cannabis analytical testing and processing laboratory in lower Vermont. Northeast Processing started out providing services for hemp farmers and producers in Vermont, but quickly expanded into other states, and became the experts in innovating and formulating hemp-derived consumer products for brands across the US, Canada and Europe.
Carl joins True Labs directly from Northeast Processing, and brings his unmatched technical, industry and analytical testing expertise, in addition to his passion for the cannabis industry, to the New Jersey market. As the Chief Science Officer for True Labs, Carl is developing and leading the lab’s scientific and technological operations, and ensuring True Lab’s commitment to quality and the cannabis industry. He is focused on enabling True Labs to provide the highest quality data to customers in the most efficient way possible, and he is excited to further add to an operation focused on integrity, ethical behavior, and scientific rigor.
Carl earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Boston College, where his research focused on natural anti-cancer compounds derived from soil bacteria. He completed his postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, where he focused on the role of complex carbohydrates in diseases like malaria. Prior to getting into the cannabis industry in Vermont, Carl has held positions as an adjunct professor of chemistry at Boston College, as a biotech consultant for The Conditas Group in Boston, and has taught at two prestigious boarding schools in New Jersey and Massachusetts.