Natalie Castro

(she/her)

PhD Student

  • Human–computer interaction   
  • Natural language processing and information retrieval 
  • MS in Information Science, University of Colorado at Boulder
  • BA in Sociology, University of Colorado at Boulder

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 tools like AI and natural language processing (NLP) can bridge the gap. She is interested in systemic inequalities and how the wider 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 at the International Conference on Computational Social Science, and published work in First Monday. Castro is a member of BostonCHI, the Boston chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). 

In her free time, Castro loves practicing yoga, knitting, drinking coffee, hiking, and visiting Boston’s beautiful art museums.