Her research centers around formal approaches to understanding and predicting functional behavior of hardware and software systems. She has a particular interest in the role of diagrammatic representations in verification. Her current work explores modular analysis of feature-oriented software systems, the computational advantages of timing diagrams as a logic for temporal specifications, and change-impact analysis for access-control policies. Kathi earned her PhD in 1996 from Indiana University, did a postdoc at Rice University and internships at Bell Labs and Intel before starting at WPI in 2000.