Bio

Dr. Katherine Amato earned a B.A. in Biology at Dartmouth College, where she completed an honors thesis on the evolution of circadian rhythm genes in Arabidopsis thaliana plants under Dr. Rob McClung and also studied abroad in field ecology in Costa Rica and Jamaica. She learned focal animal observations by working as an intern for Dr. Steve Ross at the Regenstein Center for African Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago, during the her off terms.

After graduating, Katie spent a year in Mexico comparing seed dispersal between two species of howler monkey. She worked under Alejandro Estrada of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and was funded by the Fulbright Garcia-Robles and National Geographic Young Explorers programs.

Katie earned her Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology under Dr. Paul Garber at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her 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.

She completed a postdoc at the University of Colorado Boulder under Dr. Steve Leigh and Dr. Rob Knight. Her focus was the gut microbiota of non-human primates, and her main project investigated the gut microbiota of a variety of leaf-eating primate taxa to determine how the gut microbiota may have facilitated the evolutionary transition to consuming hard-to-digest resources.

Katie is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern. Her current research investigates how the gut microbiota shapes host ecology and evolution through the lens of life history theory in wild non-human primates. It also examines similarities and differences between human and non-human primate gut microbiota to understand how humans might be unique. She is also studying how variation in human cultural and ecological factors affects the gut microbiota and ultimately health.