Katherine is a PhD candidate at Wageningen, with wide interests in the intersecting fields of nutrition, toxicology, pharmacology, immunology, and global public health. She is currently working on the ‘Cardioferment’ Project, which aims to identify and validate biomarkers of intake for fermented foods, and determine their associations with cardiometabolic factors, using a Dutch observational cohort (NQplus). This is a collaborative project between the Food Microbial Systems Research Division of Agroscope (Switzerland), and the Division of Human Nutrition at Wageningen University (The Netherlands).
Prior to coming to Europe, Katherine worked for 5 years in scientific and regulatory consulting in Canada, where she was involved in evaluating toxicological data for the safety assessment of food ingredients, and analyzing clinical trial data for the scientific substantiation of food health claims, for global food companies. While working part-time, she completed a M.S. (Toxicology) at Colorado State University in the U.S., where her thesis focused on characterizing the plasma metabolome of children with aberrant cholesterol and modulation by dietary intervention, as well as identifying dietary biomarkers through non-targeted and targeted metabolomics methods. She also holds an Honors BSc (Pharmacology and Immunology) from the University of Toronto, where she worked on developing assays for drug screening applications. Alongside, she has also been involved with several smaller-scale public health projects for NGOs in Canada, the U.S., and Guatemala, and has published several papers on topics relating to foods, metabolomics, and health.