.jpg "Sanjeewa Karunaratne, L.L.M in U.S. Law, MA in Survey Research, M.P.A photo")
Associate Director of Institutional Research and Planning
Connecticut College
New London, Connecticut, United States
Sanjeewa Karunaratne has spent the past 20 years working in institutional and enrollment research across five colleges and universities. His professional journey began with a fascination for large-scale facial recognition systems, which led him to study cluster analysis during graduate school—an experience that later informed his work building a peer group model at Connecticut College.
Over the course of his career, Sanjeewa has conducted more than 50 opinion polls, including election surveys in Minnesota and Connecticut. In higher education, his research focuses on survey non-response—particularly why some students decline to participate even within the structured environment of a college campus. For the past five years, he has focused on closing this gap to support more representative and effective decision-making that embodies community engagement.
He is especially passionate about the power of statistics—particularly sampling and post-stratification data weighting—to transform raw data into meaningful insights, assess risk, and challenge conventional thinking.
Outside of work, Sanjeewa enjoys short-distance running, robotics, and hands-on building projects. He’s also a proud father who sees higher education from both administrative and faculty perspectives, thanks to his wife’s academic career.
Sanjeewa holds an LL.M. from Fordham School of Law, and both an MPA and a Master’s in Survey Research from the University of Connecticut. Before moving to the United States, he briefly practiced as an attorney-at-law in his native Sri Lanka, where he earned his bachelor's degree with a concentration in computer science and physics, followed by his legal education.
Art or Science? Developing a Peer Group Using Cluster Analysis
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
2:45 PM – 3:30 PM East Coast USA Time