Natalie Castro is a PhD student in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston. She is advised by Christopher Le Dantec. Castro is interested in the “ecology” of labor, or how circumstances from technology to community mediate workforce opportunities. Her work looks at the many environmental barriers—from a lack of technical access to inequitably distributed information—that prevent young people from having agency and possibility as they enter the workforce, and how digital technologies and community organizations bridge the gap. She is interested in systemic inequalities and how the physical and digital environment can be designed to better support under-resourced students and young workers. Before joining Khoury College in 2025 to study human–computer interaction, civic design, and computer-supported work and social computing, Castro earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder. There, she explored the use of NLP to make school board meetings more accessible, investigated the intersection of metacognition and AI in higher education, presented her MS thesis work at the International Conference on Computational Social Science, and published two manuscripts in First Monday discussing the role of technologies and perception about climate change.
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