{"id":24585,"date":"2026-01-27T16:36:18","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T21:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/?post_type=profile&#038;p=24585"},"modified":"2026-01-27T16:36:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T21:36:18","slug":"kathryn-atherton","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/profile\/kathryn-atherton\/","title":{"rendered":"Kathryn Atherton"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span>Kathryn (Katie) Atherton, a policy associate for both the Clean Energy and Environment Legacy Transition (CELT) Initiative and the Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS) as a whole, translates Boston University research on clean energy and sustainability for non-academic partners and audiences.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>She received her MS (\u201923) and PhD (\u201925) from the Boston University Bioinformatics Graduate program, where she studied the impact of urbanization on the tree-associated microbiome under Dr. Jennifer Bhatnagar. As a graduate student, Atherton was an URBAN Biogeoscience and Environmental Health trainee, where she became passionate about science policy as a way to bridge science and communities. She interned with Speak for the Trees, Boston, to develop a tool to identify where their tree-planting programs on private property can benefit public streets and sidewalks. Prior to her graduate career, she received her BS in Agricultural and Biological Engineering from Purdue University in 2019.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Outside of work, you might find Atherton catching a movie at an AMC, picking up some books from her ever-growing \u201cto be read\u201d list at the Boston Public Library, or cheering on her favorite sports teams (Liverpool F.C. and any team from her hometown of Chicago).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23369,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/24585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23369"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/24585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24588,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/24585\/revisions\/24588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}