Sally Cary Fairfax Harrison Dieke was born in Belvoir, Virginia on February 7, 1913. Dieke attended the Potomac and Foxcroft schools, the junior college division of George Washington University, and received a Ph.D. in chemistry from The Johns Hopkins University in 1938. Her dissertation "Some Problems in the Statistical Mechanics of Condensing Systems" was written under Joseph E. Mayer. Mayer and Dieke published two papers based on this work.

Dieke spent her professional career doing research and teaching in Baltimore area colleges and universities. She was a research assistant in chemistry (1942-1943) and in psychobiology (1943-1953) at Hopkins. While doing research in psychobiology, Dieke published four papers with Curt P. Richter. Dieke did further chemical research and received a patent in 1962, but after 1950 Dieke devoted most of her efforts to astronomy. In that year Dieke began a nineteen year career teaching astronomy at Goucher College. During this time she was also a research assistant (1960) at the Observatoire de Paris and was leader of the Baltimore station in the Moonwatch Satellite Tracking Program of the International Geophysical Year (1957-1959).

Dieke also taught astronomy at Morgan State College (1956) and at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (1969-1979). She also was a Research Fellow in the History of Science at Hopkins from 1966 to 1989. Outside of teaching, Dieke served on the Governor's Science Advisory Council.

Beginning in the 1970s and continuing until her death in 1989, Dr. Dieke was active in environmental issues in Maryland. She was a member of the Sierra Club, the Maryland Conservation Council, and the Coastal Resources Advisory Committee.

Sally Harrison married Hopkins physicist Gerhard Dieke in 1938.