The granddaughter of an entomologist, Kat cannot remember a time before her interest in ecology. Raised in the Hudson and Housatonic watersheds in New York and Connecticut, her first love is the Northeastern highland forest. There, she has been privileged to watch the slow progress of maturing second-growth forests as they recover from centuries of clearing for agriculture and finds joy in the return of tender woodland ephemerals and canopy-nesting birds. At her family home in Connecticut, she and her parents have been engaged in land stewardship, invasives removal, and habitat restoration projects for over a decade. Kat has carried these practices with her to the Midwest, volunteering with the Forest Preserves of Cook County and seeking out unique ecologies to help deepen her relationships with grassland communities. She is fascinated by the way prairies fit widely variable habitat structures and enormous biodiversity into just a few square feet and can be found spending her lunches watching ecological micro-dramas unfold in the office’s front yard prairie garden.

Kat joined Living Habitats as a landscape designer, with a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She previously worked in professional offices designing large urban parks along dynamic and highly altered river corridors. Kat earned a Bachelor of Science in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Yale and focused her studies on terrestrial community ecology. She has a deep personal and professional interest in the conservation and restoration of healthy and biodiverse native plant communities and prioritizes design and stewardship practices that bring people into deeper and more ethical relationships with their non-human neighbors.

“Conducting ongoing monitoring and design work at the Chicago Botanic Garden has been an incredible opportunity to engage with a globally recognized research and educational institution, supporting its evolution as a model for the application of green infrastructure at other botanic gardens around the world. Living Habitats’ work on the Chicago Botanic Garden’s shorelines is nearing its third decade; it has been fascinating to document how these restored shoreline communities vary depending on stewardship, design, and time since establishment. It is gratifying knowing that our ongoing monitoring work will not only support the shoreline gardens as they continue to mature, but also document valuable information regarding native plant establishment and stewardship in difficult urban settings.”