Lakes Graduate Kate Starbird Appointed Assistant Professor at UW

Lakes High School alumnae and former WNBA player Kate Starbird has been appointed as an assistant professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington.

Starbird, who graduated from Lakes in 1993, will join HCDE's faculty beginning in the 2012–13 academic year. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder's Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society Institute, where she studies interaction and collaboration as enabled, supported and structured by social media and other online tools.

According to a UW news release, Starbird investigates both large-scale and small-group interaction within the context of crises and other mass disruption events, studying how digital volunteers and other members of the connected crowd work to filter and shape the information space.

(Click here to view the university's press release)

In 2009, Starbird received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for her studies. She earned a Bachelor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she also competed for the women's basketball team, earning All-America and Academic All-America honors.

Between 1997 and 2006, Starbird played professional basketball in the ABL, WNBA, and several European leagues.