Cathleen is a policy expert passionate about Internet freedom, digital rights and foreign policy. Among other things, she currently works as a consultant to Global Partners Digital (GPD) where she shapes and implements a programme aimed at empowering underrepresented voices in regional and international cyber policy debates and decision-making processes.

In former positions she worked within the International Cyber Policy Coordination Staff at the German Foreign Office where she was in charge of divising strategies for Internet Governance, promoting human rights and freedom online, as well as drafting policy concepts for capacity building and digital development. Cathleen has also worked as a research assistant with the German Insitute for International and Security Policy (SWP) looking, among other things, into practices of data exchange in the European Union and as a visiting lecturer at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.