Nugent_John

John Nugent

Director, Institutional Research and Planning

John Nugent joined Connecticut College in 2000 as a visiting assistant professor of government and transitioned to the institutional research office in 2003, where he directs a broad program of data collection, analysis, and reporting to inform College decision making, planning, teaching, management, program review and accreditation, grant writing, and marketing. He responds to data requests from on and off campus and explains and interprets institutional data and performance metrics to highlight strategic, operational, and policy implications for the College. John collaborates with other data managers on campus to coordinate or carry out reporting to external entities such as the federal and state governments, college guidebooks, and consortia. In addition to those duties, he serves on the Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy steering committee.

John has an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in government from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Safeguarding Federalism: How States Protect their Interests in National Policymaking (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009).

Sanjeewa Karunaratne

Assistant Director, Institutional Research and Planning

Sanjeewa joined Connecticut College in 2022. Prior to that, he worked at Albertus Magnus College, Fordham University, the University of New Haven, and the University of Connecticut’s Center for Survey Research and Analysis (CSRA). He has been involved in higher education since 2002 and brings over 15 years of work experience in research, modeling, data visualization, data analysis, and survey research to Connecticut College. At Albertus, in addition to collecting and reporting data to internal and external constituents, he worked closely with the Admissions team in building a number of data-tracking dashboards. At Fordham’s Office of the Vice President for Enrollment, Sanjeewa oversaw the collection and analysis of admission, enrollment, and financial aid data. As a Project Manager at CSRA, he managed its largest multiyear projects and carried out over 30 state and national surveys. In addition to Microsoft products, Sanjeewa is an expert in SPSS, Tableau, and Qualtrics.

Sanjeewa holds an LLM from Fordham School of Law, and an MPA and a Masters in Survey Research from University of Connecticut. Before moving to the United States, Sanjeewa was an attorney-at-law in his native Sri Lanka.