Catharina Helten is a research assistant and PhD student at the Chair of Adaptive Autonomy and Off-road Robotics at RPTU in Kaiserslautern. Her research focuses in particular on how autonomous systems can safely navigate and make decisions in complex, unstructured environments.

She completed her Master of Science in Computer Science at Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences as part of a dual study program with Fraunhofer IESE, with a focus on software engineering and machine learning. In her master's thesis, she developed a framework for LLM-supported hazard and risk analyses. Prior to this, she completed her Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at RPTU Kaiserslautern with a focus on Intelligent Systems.

Before starting her PhD, Catharina worked for two years as a safety engineer at Fraunhofer IESE, where she dealt with AI-supported safety technology in the automotive sector. She also gained experience as a research assistant at RPTU, where she developed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and supported teaching in Computer Architecture and System Software (RoSy).