Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science

University of Notre Dame

2021 - Present

Arthur J. Schmitt Leadership Fellowship

B.S. in Computer Science

Drexel University

2017 - 2021

Magna Cum Laude • Minors: Mathematics, Psychology

Programs & Fellowships

Sep 2025 – Jan 2026

Research Fellow

SPAR (Supervised Program for Alignment Research) · Remote

Selected as a SPAR Research Fellow to work under the supervision of Georg Lange, conducting research on mechanistic interpretability, specifically investigating whether cross-layer transcoders faithfully capture model computations.

Jan 2026 – Feb 2026

Participant

ARENA 7.0 (Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator) · London, UK

Participated in a selective alignment research training program covering mechanistic interpretability, RL, evals, and empirical AI safety research. Capstone project investigated the impact of constrained and encoded reasoning on chain-of-thought monitorability in LLMs.

Professional Experience

May 2025 – Aug 2025

Research Intern

Microsoft Research · Redmond, WA

Collaborated with the SAINTES group in MSR to design AI agents supporting human oversight in engineering tasks. Piloted with an agent for differential testing automation.

Aug 2021 – Present

Research Assistant

University of Notre Dame · Notre Dame, IN

Research under Dr. Jane Cleland-Huang on automating traceability, strengthening software accountability, and advancing requirements engineering practices.

Apr 2022 – Sep 2024

Co-founder | Lead Researcher

SAFA.ai · Notre Dame, IN

Co-founded a startup translating university research into a automated traceability platforms for safety-critical systems. Secured a NASA STTR Phase I grant, accepted into the 2023 Techstars LA cohort, and completed nine industry pilot projects.

Apr 2019 – Mar 2021

Software & Systems Engineer

Lockheed Martin · Mount Laurel, NJ

Contributed to user interface for displaying the status of elements on the Aegis System. Automated system-level testing with Python frameworks.

Publications & Writing

1

Revealing the Dark Matter: Connecting Tacit and System Knowledge in Human-AI Collaborations

Katherine R. Dearstyne, Carmen Badea, Christian Bird, Robert DeLine

2026 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), NIER Track

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

View Publication
Human-AI Collaboration Knowledge Management Software Engineering
2

Real-World Traceability Patterns for Generative AI Systems: With Insights from the Safa Dataset

Katherine R. Dearstyne, Alberto D. Rodriguez, Jane Cleland-Huang

2026 RAISE Workshop on Requirements Engineering for AI-powered SoftwarE at ICSE

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Traceability Generative AI Requirements Engineering
3

QuestRL: A Q&A Framework for Designing Trustworthy Reinforcement Learning Systems

Katherine R. Dearstyne, Pedro T. Alarcon Granadeno, Tyler Chambers, Jane Cleland-Huang

2025 IEEE 33rd International Requirements Engineering Conference

Valencia, Spain

View Publication
Reinforcement Learning Trustworthy AI Requirements Engineering
4

Assessing Compliance of Software System Designs to Laws, Regulations, and their Underlying Values

Aleksandra Marczak-Czajka, Katherine R. Dearstyne, Jane Cleland-Huang

2025 IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Designing Software (Designing)

Ottawa, ON, Canada

View Publication
Software Design Compliance Ethics
5

Supporting Software Maintenance with Dynamically Generated Document Hierarchies

Katherine R. Dearstyne, Alberto D. Rodriguez, Jane Cleland-Huang

2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution

Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

View Publication
Software Maintenance Documentation AI/ML
6

ROOT: Requirements Organization and Optimization Tool

Katherine R. Dearstyne, Alberto D. Rodriguez, Jane Cleland-Huang

2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution

Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

View Publication
Requirements Engineering Tool Optimization
7

Prompts Matter: Insights and Strategies for Prompt Engineering in Automated Software Traceability

Alberto D. Rodriguez, Katherine R. Dearstyne, Jane Cleland-Huang

2023 IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops

Hanover, Germany

View Publication
Traceability Prompt Engineering LLMs
8

SAFA: A Tool for Supporting Safety Analysis in Evolving Software Systems

Alberto D. Rodriguez, Timothy Newman, Katherine R. Dearstyne, Jane Cleland-Huang

2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

Rochester, Michigan, USA

View Publication
Safety Analysis Tool Software Evolution
9

MEWS: Real-time Social Media Manipulation Detection and Analysis

Trenton W. Ford, Michael Yankoski, William Theisen, Tom Henry, Farah Khashman, Katherine R. Dearstyne, Tim Weninger, Pamela Bilo Thomas

2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Competition and Demonstration Track

Virtual

View Publication
Social Media Misinformation Machine Learning

Blog Posts

1

Cross-Layer Transcoders are Incentivized to Learn Unfaithful Circuits

Georg Lange, RGRGRG, Kat Dearstyne, Kamal Maher

LessWrong

View Post
Mechanistic Interpretability AI Safety Cross-Layer Transcoders