Sakkaff received a Ph.D. degree in computer engineering and an M.S. degree in computer science at the department of computer science and engineering from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, M.Phil. in computer science at the University of Peradeniya, and a B.S. degree in computer science from the Open University of Sri Lanka.

Before joining Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) in 2019 as a postdoctoral appointee, Sakkaff worked at ANL as a summer research intern, where she trained to develop tools and released a Run Flux Mutual Information Analysis (RFMIA) tool for the Software Development Kit in the U.S. Department of Energy Systems Biology Knowledge Database. Her current research is in the field of computational biology with a focus on developing a universal, omics-based, autonomous early pathogen detection system in order to facilitate the early detection and treatment of diseases.

Her research interests and experiences:

• The intersection of biology, bioinformatics, statistics, computational biology
• Mathematical modeling, and computational simulation
• Telecommunication, in particular, molecular communication (MC) concepts, information and coding theory,
• Signal processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning
• Data science 
• Specializing in analyzing and interpretation of interdisciplinary data such as omics, cancer, therapeutics microbiome, and medical data including electroencephalography and near-infrared spectroscopy. She is also familiar with optimization techniques and with various computer programming languages such as Java and Python.