Katharina is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. She holds a PhD in Communication and Media Science from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, and published her disserataion in 2022 as a book titled Kommunikationsformen und Deliberationsdynamik (Communication Forms and Dynamics of Deliberation). Katharina received the Best Dissertation Award from the Democracy Foundation of the University of Cologne. Her research specializes in the field of political communication, focusing on the intersection of networked digital publics, democratic innovations, and computational mixed methods. In 2018, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance (University of Canberra). She holds the position of Chief Investigator for the research project “NewsPol: Measuring and Comparing News Media Polarization”, which is part of the Australian Laureate Fellowship Partisanship and Polarization in Online Public Debate.

At THE NEW INSTITUTE, Katharina was involved in the program Depolarizing Public Debates.