Catherine has been involved in Science Communication in one form or another since the early 1980s when she was an explainer at the fledgling Questacon. During her undergraduate studies in Physics and Mathematics at ANU she became a founding member of the Questacon Science Circus. She spent the next fifteen years as a technical writer in fields ranging from the building industry to information technology to workforce management and activity reporting. In 2001, with the assistance of a scholarship from the Australian Centre for Remote Sensing,  she completed an M.Phil. at CPAS, A History of Satellite-based Remote Sensing in Australia 1971-1989. After a pause  to start a family, Catherine returned to ANU in 2003, this time in the Research Office, collecting, analysing and interpreting statistics relating to the University's research performance.

Many years of working with performance indicators of various types has given Catherine the underlying motivation for her PhD research into the communication of organisational outcomes using simple performance indicators.