Katherine R. Amato

I am from Wilmette, IL, outside of Chicago. I attended New Trier HS where I played basketball and threw the discus. I also participated in the Shedd Aquarium HS Marine Biology Program in Bimini, Bahamas. I attended Dartmouth College as an undergrad where I earned a degree in Biology. I received high honors for my thesis on the evolution of circadian rhythm genes in Arabidopsis thaliana plants under Rob McClung. I minored in Psychology and became fluent in Spanish. I was an avid hiker with the Dartmouth Outing Club and was a writer and editor for The Dartmouth Independent. I studied abroad in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Jamaica and volunteered at the Regenstein Center for African Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago, during my summers.
After graduating I spent a year in Mexico comparing seed dispersal between two species of howler monkey. I worked under A. Estrada of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and was funded by the Fulbright Garcia-Robles and National Geographic Young Explorers programs.
I earned my Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology under P.A. Garber at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My dissertation work investigated host-microbe interactions in wild howler monkeys and was funded by the University of Illinois, National Geographic, and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Colorado Boulder under Steve Leigh and Rob Knight. I am investigating the gut microbiota of a variety of primate taxa with the ability to eat large quantities of leaves in order to determine how the gut microbiota may have facilitated the evolutionary transition to consuming hard-to-digest resources.
More info: http://www.kramato.com/