Catherine D’Ignazio is the person behind that really cute baby. She is a Research Assistant at the MIT Center for Civic Media and Assistant Professor of Civic Media & Data Visualization at Emerson College. Her background is in visual art, writing software code, and rolling around in public spaces.

Her current research focuses on designing more equitable, open and playful news discovery systems and on launching the Open Water Initiative with Public Lab. Open Water seeks to create low-cost, participatory hardware and software tools to make water quality monitoring more accessible and legible to local communities.