Catherine Evelyn Starbird (born July 30, 1975) is an American computer scientist and former professional basketball player. Playing at the

guard Guard or guards may refer to: Professional occupations * Bodyguard, who protects an individual from personal assault * Crossing guard, who stops traffic so pedestrians can cross the street * Lifeguard, who rescues people from drowning * Prison ...

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 The Naismith College Player of the Year is an annual basketball award given by the Atlanta Tipoff Club to the top men's and women's collegiate basketball players. It is named in honor of Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball. History an ...

, 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 The Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) is an American professional basketball league. It is composed of twelve teams, all based in the United States. The league was founded on April 22, 1996, as the women's counterpart to the Natio ...

, and various European teams. Having been a

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

major at an undergraduate at Stanford, Starbird completed a doctorate in technology, media, and society at the

University of Colorado at Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sy ...

in 2012. Later that year, she joined the faculty of the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattl ...

. 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 West Point is the oldest continuously occupied military post in the United States. Located on the Hudson River in New York, West Point was identified by General George Washington as the most important strategic position in America during the Ame ...

, to a military family. Her father Edward Starbird was a

United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land warfare, land military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight Uniformed services of the United States, U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army o ...

colonel, and her mother Margaret (née Leonard) was a teacher and author. Growing up in

Tacoma, Washington Tacoma ( ) is the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. A port city, it is situated along Washington's Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, northeast of the state capital, Olympia, and northwest of Mount Rainier National Pa ...

, 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 The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak ) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorpor ...

All-America MVP. She was also named Washington Player of the Year by Gatorade and ''

USA Today ''USA Today'' (stylized in all uppercase) is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth on September 15, 1982, the newspaper operates from Gannett's corporate headquarters in Tysons, Virgi ...

''. At the 1993

Women's Basketball Coaches Association The Women's Basketball Coaches Association is an association of coaches of women's basketball teams at all levels. The organization was formed in 1981, with the goal of addressing the needs of women's basketball coaches. The mission of the WBCA ...

High School All-America Game, she scored 12 points and earned MVP honors.

College basketball career

At Stanford University, Starbird played at

for the Stanford Cardinal under coach

Tara VanDerveer Tara Ann VanDerveer (born June 26, 1953) is an American basketball coach who has been the head women's basketball coach at Stanford University since 1985. Designated the Setsuko Ishiyama Director of Women's Basketball, VanDerveer led the Stanf ...

from 1993 to 1997 with NCAA tournament appearances every season, including the Final Four from 1995 to 1997. In her first season in 1993–94, Starbird averaged 9.9 points and 2.9 rebounds and made the Pac-10 All-Freshman team. Starbird had a breakout season in 1994–95 with 16.0 points, 4.2 rebounds, and 4.0 assists and was a first-team All-Pac-10 honoree. Averaging 20.1 points, 4.7 rebounds, and 3.5 assists as a junior in 1995–96, Starbird was the Pac-10's Co-Player of the Year and received multiple All-American honors, specifically first team honors from Kodak, ''Basketball America'' magazine, and the United States Basketball Writers Association and second team honors from the

Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. ne ...

and

United Press International United Press International (UPI) is an American international news agency whose newswires, photo, news film, and audio services provided news material to thousands of newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations for most of the 20t ...

. On January 13, 1996, Starbird scored a career high 44 points against USC. As a senior in 1996–97, Starbird averaged 20.9 points, 3.7 rebounds, and 3.2 assists and was a first-team Associated Press All-American. Starbird also won the

USBWA Women's National Player of the Year The United States Basketball Writers Association National Player of the Year Award is an award that has been presented by the United States Basketball Writers Association since the 1987–88 season to the top women's college basketball player in NC ...

award, and

WBCA Player of the Year The Women's Basketball Coaches Association Player of the Year award is presented annually to the best women's college basketball players in NCAA Division II and NCAA Division III, Division III as voted by the WBCA membership. From 1983 to 2000, the ...

awards. Upon graduating, Starbird had a program record 2,215 career points. That record would be broken 11 years later in 2008 by

Candice Wiggins Candice Dana Wiggins (born February 14, 1987) is an American former professional basketball player. Wiggins played college basketball at Stanford University, where she graduated as the all-time leading scorer in Stanford and Pac-10 women's basket ...

. Starbird graduated from Stanford in 1997 with a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

College statistics

Sources:

International basketball career

Starbird represented the US at the 1997 World University Games held in Marsala,

Sicily (man) it, Siciliana (woman) , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = Ethnicity , demographics1_footnotes = , demographi ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

in August 1997. The USA team won all six games, earning the gold medal at the event. Starbird averaged 8.7 points per game.

Professional basketball career

After college, she was selected by the

Seattle Reign OL Reign is an American professional women's soccer team based in Seattle, Washington. Founded by Bill and Teresa Predmore in 2012 as Seattle Reign FC, it was one of eight inaugural members of the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL). In 2020, ...

with the fourth overall pick in the 1997 ABL draft. In two seasons with the Reign, Starbird played in 59 games and averaged 12.9 points, 2.8 rebounds, and 2.8 assists. The ABL shut down and filed for bankruptcy in late December 1998. In 1999, the

Sacramento Monarchs The Sacramento Monarchs were a basketball team based in Sacramento, California. They played in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) from 1997 until folding on November 20, 2009. They played their home games at ARCO Arena. The Mona ...

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. In the 2000 expansion draft, the

Miami Sol The Miami Sol were a professional women's basketball team that was based in Miami and entered the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) in 2000. They played their games at American Airlines Arena as the sister team to the Miami Heat of the ...

selected Starbird then traded her to the

Utah Starzz Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to its ...

for

Elena Baranova Elena Viktorovna Baranova (russian: Елена Викторовна Баранова; born 28 January 1972) is a Russian former professional basketball player. She is a former Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) player, where she bec ...

and a second-round pick. Starbird averaged 4.0 points in 2000 and 4.7 points in 2001 with the Starzz. Starbird played professional basketball in Europe during the two offseasons, in France in 2000–01 and Austria in 2001–02. In 2002, Starbird averaged 1.7 points in 15 games for the Starzz before being traded to the Seattle Storm for

Semeka Randall Semeka Chantay Randall-Lay (born February 7, 1979, in Cleveland, Ohio) is the current head coach for the Winthrop Eagles women's basketball team. She is also a former collegiate and professional basketball player. She was hired as recruiting coor ...

. With the Storm, Starbird averaged a career high 5.9 points. The Storm waived Starbird prior to the 2003 season. In the 2003–04 offseason, Starbird played in 14 games for the Spanish team Adecco Estudiantes Madrid, averaging 18.7 points and 5.1 rebounds. Starbird played her final year in the WNBA with the Indiana Fever in 2004, averaging 1.7 points and 0.8 rebounds. After the 2004 WNBA season, Starbird returned to Estudiantes. She played for PDV Ibiza during the 2005–06 season.

Academic career

Starbird earned a

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

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 The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sy ...

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

Department of Human Centered Design &

Engineering Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more speciali ...

, 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. One of the shooting events Starbird documented was the attack at the

Pulse nightclub Pulse was a gay bar, dance club, and nightclub in Orlando, Florida, founded in 2004 by Barbara Poma and Ron Legler. On June 12, 2016, the club was the scene of the second worst mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history, and the second ...

in Orlando. 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 World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

. Grandfather Charles Leonard was an Olympic silver medalist and the first Olympian with a perfect pistol shooting score. Great-great-grandfather George A. Dodd was an Army officer who fought in the Battle of Guerrero. In 2008, Starbird married Melissa Marsh. Starbird said in a 2011 interview with ''

ESPN the Magazine ''ESPN The Magazine'' was an American monthly sports magazine published by the ESPN sports network in Bristol, Connecticut. The first issue was published on March 11, 1998. Initially published every other week, it scaled back to 24 issues a year ...

'' 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.

Notes

External links

Official academic page
at the

WNBA player file

March 22, 1996 ''San Francisco Examiner'' article on Starbird's family and career at Stanford
{{DEFAULTSORT:Starbird, Kate 1975 births Living people All-American college women's basketball players American expatriate basketball people in Spain American women computer scientists American computer scientists American women's basketball players Basketball players from New York (state) Basketball players from Tacoma, Washington Human–computer interaction researchers Indiana Fever players Ladies' Gaelic football managers Lesbian academics Lesbian sportswomen LGBT people from Washington (state) American LGBT sportspeople North American GAA Parade High School All-Americans (girls' basketball) People from Lakewood, Washington People from West Point, New York Sacramento Monarchs players Seattle Reign (basketball) players Seattle Storm players Shooting guards Small forwards Stanford Cardinal women's basketball players Universiade gold medalists for the United States Universiade medalists in basketball University of Colorado Boulder alumni Utah Starzz players