Catherine Wieczorek is a PhD candidate in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Tech, co-advised by Dr. Shaowen Bardzell and Dr. Carl DiSalvo.

Catherine's research examines how public institutions and workplaces organize time, and the asymmetries this creates between the people who set its pace and those who must keep up. Her work is often practice-based, combining qualitative fieldwork with participatory design to pose questions alongside the communities she works with. In her dissertation, she studies the temporality of public library work, designing a toolkit through which library workers map the hidden conditions of their daily practice and collectively examine how those conditions shape their labor, the burdens they carry, and their capacity to act.

She has published at ACM CHI, CSCW, DIS, and the Design Research Society conference (DRS). Committed to alternative forms of knowledge sharing in HCI, she co-created the ACM DIS Zine Library and has supported the development of Alternative Research Outcomes (AROs) community, which advocates for zines, exhibitions, documentaries, and other creative forms as legitimate endpoints for HCI research. Her own work has appeared in group exhibitions, and her earlier design work was recognized by Core77, featured on NPR, and selected as a finalist on America ByDesign: Innovations.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Catherine worked at public health research centers and consultancies including the D-Lab at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Flip Labs, and the Design Lab at the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3) at the University of Chicago. Before moving into research-focused work, she started out as a graphic designer in Chicago. She holds a M.S. in Informatics from Penn State University, MDes from the IIT Institute of Design, and B.A. in Visual Communication from Loyola University Chicago.