Katharine Marie Lee

Katharine MN Lee is a biological anthropologist and engineer studying women's health using theoretical perspectives derived from feminist biology and anthropology. She completed her PhD in Anthropology with a graduate minor in Gender and Women's Studies and a certificate in Science Communication in summer 2020. Katharine earned her Bachelor’s of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering from Tulane University and her Master’s of Science in Business Administration from Texas A&M – Texarkana as part of a fellowship with the Department of Defense. She has worked as an engineer at the Center for Military Biomechanics Research at Natick Soldier Systems Center and the Biophysics and Biomedical Modeling Division of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine. Her two main research projects while at UIUC focused on bone health in adult women and the experiences of underrepresented groups in STEM. Working with Polish and Polish-American women, the first project focused on how physical activity and reproductive hormones across the lifespan affect bone in healthy adult premenopausal women. The second project interrogated how identity – gender, sex, sexual orientation, race, ability, and religion – interacts with experiences of hostile work climate and harassment for people in astronomy and planetary sciences. Katharine works to combine her experience in engineering to optimize data collection and manipulation techniques with anthropology to situate that data in complex social and historical contexts. Her dissertation research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American Philosophical Society, and multiple internal UIUC funding mechanisms.