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

Having been a computer science major at an undergraduate at Stanford, Starbird completed a doctorate in technology, media, and society at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012.

[1][2][3] Her father Edward Starbird was a United States Army colonel, and her mother Margaret (née Leonard) was a teacher and author.

[5] At the 1993 Women's Basketball Coaches Association High School All-America Game, she scored 12 points and earned MVP honors.

[15] In the 2000 expansion draft, the Miami Sol selected Starbird then traded her to the Utah Starzz for Elena Baranova and a second-round pick.

[8] 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.

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.

"[18] Beginning in September 2012, she was a faculty member of the University of Washington Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering,[19][20] where she directs the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation (emCOMP) lab.

[25] 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.

[26] 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.

[11][30] 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.