Sharlini Sankaran is the Assistant Director and Research Manager for the North Carolina Board of Science & Technology.  Her duties include managing, supervising, and carrying out activities necessary to execute the Board’s research programs, as well as serving as the second-in-charge of the administrative functions of the Board.

Sharlini’s interests include science policy, technology transfer, workforce retraining, and increasing female and minority participation in science and engineering. Prior to joining the Department of Commerce, she worked as a consultant for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, evaluating the outcomes of their multidisciplinary Institutional Awards at the Scientific Interface. Her work was presented to a subcommittee of the National Academies of Science.  She also taught fiber optics and computer science classes at Durham Technical Community College for the past year.

From 2006 to early 2007, Sharlini served as manager of education programs at Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, a 60,000-member international honor society. Her duties included managing science, math, and engineering programs aimed at increasing diversity in science and engineering at all levels of education and the workforce.  She helped coordinate a National Science Foundation summit: “Assuring a Globally Engaged Science and Engineering Workforce” which addressed education, research, and industry aspects of global engagement.

Sharlini’s Ph.D. research focused on using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study how the human brain processes sensory information. She has presented her research at international conferences of the Society for Neuroscience and the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. Sharlini’s research on cardiac SPECT imaging has been published as an award-winning paper in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

Sharlini holds the Ph.D. degree in biomedical engineering from UNC-Chapel Hill, and M.S. and B.S. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. She is a native of Malaysia and lives with her husband Will, daughter, and newborn son in Durham, NC.