Sara Lafia
Research Methodologist III at NORC at the University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolSara Lafia is a Research Methodologist with over a decade of experience designing reproducible data pipelines, validation frameworks, and discovery tools that make complex research data more accessible and actionable. Currently at NORC at the University of Chicago, she blends study design and analytic rigor to drive strategic insights across multidisciplinary projects. Her background includes research fellowships and collaborations with ICPSR, academic libraries, and environmental data centers where she developed linked metadata models and ontology-driven search to boost dataset discovery and reuse. She pairs technical skills in documentation and visualization with a strong grounding in GIS and spatial analysis from graduate work in geography, enabling her to translate domain-specific data into usable metrics and tools. An early contributor to linked-data thesauri and ontology expansion efforts, she brings a persistent focus on reproducibility and user-centered data discovery that often uncovers value beyond conventional impact metrics.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Geography, PhD, Geography at UC Santa BarbaraCal Poly Pomona
Spanish, English
Stackoverflow
145reputation
15kreached
0answers
8questions
Github Skills (36)
semantics9
owl8
ontology8
ontologies8
metadata7
nested6
dictionary6
excel6
directory-structure6
docker6
dataframe6
linked-data6
triplestore6
dbpedia6
scientific-workflow5
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
saralafia/saralafia.github.io
Aug 2020 - Mar 2025
Contributions:54 pushes in 4 years 7 months
saralafia/ERI-maps
Mar 2020 - Oct 2020
Contributions:33 commits, 32 pushes in 7 months
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