Karina is a PhD student in Language and Information Technologies within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She also holds the first joint BA in Computer Science and History from Harvard. She has been interested in fairness, ethics, and social good from a computational perspective since high school but became more focused on public health and anti-ableism after witnessing the disregard many of her college classmates and university leadership had for the contagiousness and severity of COVID.
Having served as an undergrad TA in math and computer science for 5 semesters between 2021 and 2023, she has witnessed first-hand the cascading effects of COVID infections and post-infection sequelae on student performance in courses, research, and extracurricular activities. Outside of academics, Karina is also an active dancer (mainly ballet, contemporary, jazz, lyrical, character/folk), choreographer, and theater technician/administrator (mainly directing, producing, lighting design, sound engineering, stage management, house management).
She co-directed a modern dance company in college and was forced to personally handle multiple last-minute COVID cases that caused dramatic changes in the company's shows, and she currently co-directs and is the producer for a ballet company. She maintains 100% respirator usage outside her home because she wants to be able to keep doing research, dance, and tech for as long as she can, and long COVID can take that away in an instant.
