Catharina is a lawyer by training and has been involved in intellectual property and public licensing models for over 15 years beginning with her work as director for Creative Commons International overseeing and stewarding the Creative Commons global licensing suite and managing the global license porting project. Catharina has worked closely with the World Economic Forum, where she served on the Global Agenda Council on the intellectual property system.

She has founded the Software Compliance Academy, a private training and consulting firm to support clients in their Open Source journey and currently also helps lead MBition’s (Mercedes-Benz subsidiary based in Berlin) technology strategy focussing on system level architectural questions for the next generation of infotainment systems.

In addition to her work with various clients, Catharina has helped to initiate the OpenChain project, the first international standard for Open Source license compliance (ISO/IEC 5230) to bring efficiency and trust into the Open Source supply chain. She has written and taught extensively on IT policy and standardization questions and especially the intersection between Open Source software and standards.

Her academic appointments included faculty positions at Keio University in Japan and Bucerius Law School in Germany, visiting positions at the University of Puerto Rico and Humboldt University in Berlin, and as faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University in the US. She is a member of the Council for the Legal Network at the Free Software Foundation Europe and a fellow at the Open Forum Europe.

Catharina received her PhD from the Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel with a scholarship from the Max Plack Institute for Intellectual Property in Munich, Germany.

Catharina has been elected to the OSI board in October 2021 and served as board chair since April 2022.