Dr. Katherine R. Amato

Dr. Katherine R. Amato is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado Boulder, where her research centers on the gut microbiota and its role in helping wild primates adapt to their habitats. She is particularly interested in how gut microbes have influenced the evolution of primate and human diets and physiology. Fluent in Spanish, Dr. Amato conducts most of her fieldwork in the rainforests of Mexico and Central America. In addition to her primate research, she contributes to the American Gut project and engages in various studies focused on non-Western human populations. Dr. Amato earned her undergraduate degree in Biology from Dartmouth College in 2007, followed by a Fulbright Fellowship to study howler monkeys in Mexico. She completed her Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013, with her research funded primarily by National Geographic and the National Science Foundation. She teaches the course "Gut Check: Exploring Your Microbiome."