Impact Fellow, Columbia University
Katie Watson is a computer scientist focused on the intersection of storytelling and interactive technology. With a background in computer graphics and the arts, her current research interests include image synthesis, web-based real-time rendering and 3D reconstruction. She is drawn to the puzzle of finding methods of interpreting sparse or noisy “in-the-wild” datasets. As part of the New York Times R&D Team, Watson worked on NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields) and data visualization. She has also held research positions at Pixar and the Walt Disney Company. At Disney Research, her work on a method of interactively visualizing film scripts led to a published paper and a patent. Katie holds a B.A. from Yale University, where she double-majored in Computer Science and Global Affairs.