Katie became an Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School after her postdoctoral fellowship in the Mahajan lab.  Her overall research goal was to discover and understand the mechanisms underlying neuroretinal disease and to develop novel therapeutics for these complex degenerative disorders using gene therapy, cell transplantations, and genome engineering technologies. She utilized gene editing strategies to create mouse models for human disease and studied specific mutations within human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells. Katie earned her  Master of Science in Human Clinical Nutrition from Columbia University in 2009 and a Ph.D. in Nutrition and Metabolic Biology from Columbia University in 2013. She completed her first post-doctoral fellowship in genome engineering, stem cell, and developmental biology at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.