Kate Starbird

Catherine Evelyn Starbird (born July 30, 1975) is an American computer scientist and former women's professional basketball player.

Playing at the guard position, Starbird earned All-American honors as a high school athlete at Lakes High School in Lakewood, Washington, and later at the collegiate level at Stanford. The 1997 Naismith College Player of the Year, Starbird helped Stanford make three consecutive Final Four appearances from 1995 to 1997 and scored 2,215 career points, a school record that stood for 11 years. From 1997 to 2006, Starbird played professional basketball in the American Basketball League, Women's National Basketball Association, and various European teams.

Having been a computer science major as an undergraduate at Stanford, Starbird completed a doctorate in technology, media, and society at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012. Later that year, she joined the faculty of the University of Washington. Her research focuses on disinformation and social media communication during disasters.

Early life Catherine Evelyn Starbird was born July 30, 1975, in West Point, New York, to a military family. Her father Edward Starbird was a United States Army colonel, and her mother Margaret (née Leonard) was a teacher and author.

Growing up in Tacoma, Washington, Starbird attended Lakes High School in nearby Lakewood. As a senior in 1993, Starbird made the Parade All-American first team and was the Kodak All-America MVP. She was also named Washington Player of the Year by Gatorade and USA Today. Starbird also won the Naismith College Player of the Year, USBWA Women's National Player of the Year award, and WBCA Player of the Year awards.

Upon graduating, Starbird had a program record 2,215 career points.

Starbird graduated from Stanford in 1997 with a Bachelor of Science in computer science.

Career statistics WNBA Regular season

Playoffs

College Sources:

In 1999, the Sacramento Monarchs selected Starbird in the third round (26th overall) in the WNBA draft. Starbird played in 24 games with one start for the Monarchs in 1999, averaging 2.0 points and 1.0 rebounds. She was then traded her and a 2000 first-round pick to the Utah Starzz for Elena Baranova and a 2000 second-round pick.

Academic career Starbird earned a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2009. Studying in the Alliance of Technology, Learning, And Society (A.T.L.A.S.) program, she received her Ph.D. in technology, media, and society at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2012; her thesis was titled "Crowdwork, Crisis and Convergence: How the Connected Crowd Organizes Information during Mass Disruption Events."

Beginning in September 2012, she was a faculty member of the University of Washington Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, where she directs the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation (emCOMP) lab. In 2019, Starbird was promoted to associate professor.

She studies educational possibilities of social media as well as crisis informatics. Her research sits at the intersection of computer science and social science and falls within the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Using a combination of empirical methods, including qualitative, computational and network analysis, Starbird examines both small group and large scale interaction online within the context of disasters and other mass disruption events, studying how digital volunteers and other members of the crowd work to filter and shape the information space. In another research project, her analysis of a dataset of 600,000 tweets about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico helped to put together a map of how information was shared among those close to the event and more broadly.

Personal life Starbird's grandfather Alfred Dodd Starbird was an Olympic athlete who was an Army general during World War II. Grandfather Charles Leonard was an Olympic silver medalist and the first Olympian with a perfect pistol shooting score.

In 2008, Starbird married Melissa Marsh. Starbird said in a 2011 interview with ESPN the Magazine that she never considered a career in coaching basketball due to concerns that she would need to be closeted.

Besides basketball, Starbird has also played Gaelic football. In 2007, she managed the Seattle Gaels women's Gaelic football team.