Kate Starbird


Kate Starbird is an American computer scientist and former professional basketball player. Starbird joined the faculty of the University of Washington Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering in 2012, and was promoted to associate professor in 2019. She is a former professional basketball player in the Women's National Basketball Association and the American Basketball League.

Basketball career

Born July 30, 1975 in West Point, New York, Starbird attended Lakes High School in Lakewood, Washington where she was named a High School All-American by the WBCA. She participated in the WBCA High School All-America Game in 1993, scoring twelve points, and earning MVP honors.
At Stanford University, Starbird held the all-time Cardinal career scoring record with 2,215 points until January 31, 2008 when Candice Wiggins broke the record. In 1997, she was awarded the women's Naismith College Player of the Year award, the USBWA Women's National Player of the Year award, and the WBCA Player of the Year award. After college, she joined the ABL's Seattle Reign.
In 1999 she was drafted into the WNBA by the Sacramento Monarchs, who selected her 26th overall in the 3rd round of the 1999 WNBA Draft. She was then picked up by the Miami Sol in the 1999 expansion draft, then traded to the Utah Starzz for Elena Baranova and a second-round pick. She was then traded by the Starzz to the Seattle Storm for Semeka Randall in 2002. She missed the 2003 season, then joined the Fever in 2004.
She was inducted to the Stanford Athletic Hall of Fame on November 2, 2007.

Stanford statistics

Source
YearTeamGPPointsFG%3P%FT%RPGAPGSPGBPGPPG
1994Stanford3130850.0%50.0%83.1%2.92.61.30.59.9
1995Stanford3251152.4%39.2%74.3%4.24.02.70.616.0
1996Stanford3264347.2%34.5%84.7%4.73.52.10.720.1
1997Stanford3675351.1%42.5%82.2%3.73.21.60.420.9
Career131221550.1%39.2%81.5%3.93.31.90.516.9

USA Basketball

Starbird represented the USA at the 1997 World University Games held in Marsala, Sicily, Italy in August 1997. The USA team won all six games, earning the gold medal at the event. Starbird averaged 8.7 points per game.

ABL career

1997-1999: Seattle Reign

WNBA career

1999: Sacramento Monarchs
2000–2002: Utah Starzz
2002: Seattle Storm
2004: Indiana Fever

Academic career

Since September 2012, she has been a faculty member of the University of Washington Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering as an associate professor, where she directs the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation lab. She graduated in 1997 with a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. Starbird earned a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2009. She received her Ph.D. in the Alliance of Technology, Learning, And Society program at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012.
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 and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. 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 major shooting events Starbird documented was the attack at the Pulse nightclub 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.