Cathy Lee Gierke grew up in Minnesota, riding and training horses, fishing, and reading voraciously.

At Univac, she validated new mainframe and hardware designs using assembler, PLUS, C, COBOL, PTS, and other languages. In the Peace Corps, Cathy extended her computer knowledge to PCs and organized an international web-based network that repaired and donated computers to schools in Jamaica.

At the Carlson School of Management, she managed and enhanced CARS, the U’s first web-based automated recruiting system for the Business Career Center. Cathy was a recipient of an UMRA Professional Development Grant in 2014 for her R-language program to analyze time-series for periodicities. She studies biological rhythms with the U’s Halberg Chronobiology Center. Cathy helped develop the current UMRA website and serves on UMRA’s Communication Task Force.