Dr. Talagala is a statistician who has had a rich academic and research experience in mathematical statistics and statistical machine learning. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Statistics at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura in Sri Lanka. Her research is aimed at creating novel machine learning statistical tools that can be used for open, explainable, and reproducible data-driven discoveries by both practitioners and researchers.

Dr. Talagala studied at Monash University, Australia, and graduated in Mathematics and Statistics. She is also an Associate Editor of The R Journal, which is published by the R Foundation, a part of the statistical computing community across the world.

Dr. Talagala is a proponent of reproducible research development by creating open-source software, and has developed several R packages to that effect, which are available in CRAN. She is also a founder of the Dengue Data Hub, which is the central repository that is aimed at supporting dengue-related data research and analysis. Her work on science communication received attention on the international level when she was awarded as the Global Judges' Choice Winner of the Short Talk, Big Impact competition established by OWSD-UNESCO in 2020.