About Kate

Affiliations: MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering, WHOI Biological Oceanography

I am deeply inspired by and curious about the fundamental dynamics and origins of life on Earth. To this end, I study microbes and viruses in a wide range of environments. I use genomic and molecular data with computational tools to explore microbial evolution, ecology, and population dynamics.

I am currently a PhD student in Colleen Hansel’s Lab in the MIT / WHOI Joint Program in Biological Oceanography. After graduating from Macalester College as a Biology Major, I worked as a staff researcher in Jillian Banfield’s Lab at UC Berkeley for two years. I then completed a MS in Jonathan Eisen’s Lab in the Population Biology Graduate Group at UC Davis.

Previously, I have collaborated in individual research projects with Dr. Rachel Brem at the Buck Institute, Dr. Shannon Bennett and Dr. Durrell Kapan at the California Academy of Sciences, Prof. Philipp Engel at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and Prof. Devavani Chatterjea at Macalester College.

See Research and Publications.