Katie received her Bachelor’s of Science Degree from the University of Pittsburgh in the spring of 2020, majoring in psychology and minoring in gender, sexuality and women’s studies. Throughout her time at Pitt, Katie worked in multiple research labs, and she completed a directed research project with Dr. Erika Forbes as well as a senior honors thesis with Dr. Anna Marsland. Her thesis was driven by her main academic interest in health psychology and investigated the association between diet, adiposity and peripheral markers of inflammation. From this experience, she has acquired many more questions about how lifestyle behaviors (i.e. diet and exercise) affect brain/body outcomes. She wishes to continue exploring some of these answers in a doctoral program in health psychology. Outside of research pursuits, Katie spends much of her time cooking (more recently baking A LOT of bread), rock climbing, biking and tending to her abundance of plants.