Katharina Wankat has been a researcher at WU's Competence Center for Nonprofit Organisations and Social Entrepreneurship since May 2023. She is currently working on projects in the field of homelessness and care.

She studied political science at the University of Vienna and subsequently completed her master's degree in socioeconomics. In her Master's thesis, she dealt with the socio-ecological housing issue and explored the question of whether, and if so, to what extent ecological housing projects can be drivers for a socio-ecological transformation. After her Master's degree, she worked at the Institute for Social Change and Sustainability on a third-party funded research project entitled "Urban Experiments for a Social-Ecological Transformation".