Sara is a research methodologist in the Methodology & Quantitative Social Sciences Department at NORC at the University of Chicago. Sara is an information scientist with over eight years of experience studying and developing data infrastructure. She applies computational methods in her research including supervised and unsupervised machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), data mining, data visualization, network analysis, and statistical analysis.

She uses these methods to process and analyze archival and administrative records, digital records such as bibliometric data, geospatial data, social media data, and usage data collected via platforms like Google Analytics and Jira. She also has experience developing interactive information visualizations and dashboards, designing taxonomies for information organization, and deploying information retrieval pipelines.

Sara focuses on data analytics, curation, and discovery challenges in government and private projects. She is the lead methodologist for the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) Data Concierge Models for a National Secure Data Service (NSDS) project and provides task support for the NCSES Data Usage Platform as a Federal Data Asset project. In these roles, she is developing models for data concierge services and data usage platforms that can help federal data users identify relevant data and facilitate evidence-based decision-making. She is also conducting interviews with federal statistical agency staff and data users to articulate user experience (UX) requirements. Her work also develops methods to track data impact through citation analysis for the General Social Survey (GSS).

Prior to joining NORC, Sara was a research fellow at the University of Michigan where she studied the impact of data curation and use of AI for data discovery at ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. She also taught data visualization in the University of Michigan’s Master of Applied Data Science Program. Sara’s work has been supported by awards from the National Science Foundation and the Michigan Institute for Data Science. She has led the publication of 12 peer-reviewed articles in high-profile international outlets including the Journal of Documentation, Data Science Journal, and Quantitative Science Studies.