Catherine (“Katie”) Ertz is the National Center for Women & Information Technology’s Operations Executive Advisor. A computer scientist by training, she has had over 11 years of on-the-job training in financial management through managing NCWIT’s financial and legal operations.
Katie began her career as a member of the Space Shuttle Team at Lockheed Electronics, based at Johnson Space Center, where she was a developer on Shuttle Documentation Aids (SDA), a document processing system that was used to prepare flight plans for early shuttle missions. Following graduate school, Katie’s career took her to AT&T Bell Labs, Lucent Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs, where she specialized in Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and communications middleware architecture and development for over 22 years.
She received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Mississippi State University, and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She was named a 2014 Distinguished Fellow of the Bagley College of Engineering at Mississippi State University.