Biography

Catherine Chavula is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests are in the area of Information Retrieval (IR), particularly in supporting struggling and exploratory search tasks, and Search As Learning (SAL). She combines user and computational perspectives to study search systems, including understanding human interaction behaviour in search systems; and developing computational techniques to enhance searching experience for users in different contexts. Her current research explores how to support creativity in search systems, and is being mentored by Prof. Soo Young Rieh.

Catherine Chavula studied for her Ph.D. at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. Her doctoral research examined the use of language similarities to improve the quality of search results and user experience for speakers of resource-scarce languages. She obtained her MSc in Computer Science from the University of Essex, and BSc from the University of Malawi.

Degrees

PhD Computer Science, University of Cape Town
MSc Computer Science, Essex university
BSc Computer Science, University of Malawi