University of Miami Libraries (UML) is pleased to announce the appointment of Thilani Samarakoon as biomedical data librarian. Reporting to the Head of Data Services and working within the Digital Strategies division, Thilani will play a central role in developing and providing library services for access, use, and manipulation of quantitative and qualitative datasets in biomedical research, scientific research, and laboratory environments. While she will be primarily located at the Calder Medical Library on the UM medical campus, the position will work closely with the Data Services team, Data Scientist, and liaison librarians located on the Coral Gables campus, as well as the Executive Director of the Medical Library and the Library’s Head of Learning, Research, & Clinical Information Services. UML is in the process of building a coordinated cross-campus data services and data management infrastructure, and this position will play a critical role in creating a data services component for the medical campus.
Thilani received her Ph.D. in chemistry from Kansas State University and Master of Information Science from the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, specializing in business intelligence and analytics, and focusing on processing, visualizing, and interpreting data. She was previously the project coordinator for the Department of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Utah.
Before working as a project coordinator, she worked as a cancer researcher for over eight years, following her dissertation on quantifying the levels and types of proteases expressed by different stages of cancer. She has expertise in R, SQL, and Tableau, and experience working with datasets of all sizes. She also has several patents and publications to her name.
Thilani Samarakoon can be reached at thilani.samarakoon@miami.edu.
