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. One of the 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. 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. 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 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 University of Washington WNBA player file Stanford player profile March 22, 1996 San Francisco Examiner article on Starbird's family and career at Stanford 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