Born in 1976. After studying French, Linguistics and History in Bielefeld and Paris (1995 - 2001), Karola received her PhD in Linguistics from Bielefeld University, Germany (2006) working on the topic of multimodal aspects of student-teacher interaction in immersive classrooms (supervised by Prof. E. Gülich & Prof. U. Dausendschön-Gay). Her PhD has been honored with the Dissertation Award of the Westfälisch-Lippische Universitätsgesellschaft. She has since held positions as postdoctoral researcher in EU-projects with the ‘Work, Interaction & Technology’ research centre at King’s College London, UK (2005 – 2008, Prof. C. Heath), as well as with the Applied Informatics group and the CoR-Lab at Bielefeld University (2008 – 2011, Prof. G. Sagerer). Since 2012, she is a Dilthey Fellow funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, and has headed the research group “Interactional Linguistics & Human-Robot-Interaction” at the Center of Excellence "Cognitive Interaction Technology" (CITEC, Bielefeld). In 2014, Karola has been appointed as professor in the Institute of Communication Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen and continues to be an associated member at CITEC.

Karola Pitsch has been Principal Investigator of several third-party funded projects, such as with the BMBF, within the CRC 673 ’Alignment in Communication’ (DFG) and the Centre of Excellence ‘Cognitive Interaction Technology’. From 2012 to 2016, she has been a fellow in the ZiF Network of Young Scholars. In 2016, she was involved in the planning committee of the “Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Integration and Migration” (InZentIM) and serves currently as a member of its board of directors.

Karola Pitsch has undertaken extended research stays at UCLA (USA, supervisor: Ch. Goodwin), the universities of Tsukuba and Saitama (Japan), at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France), and at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina).