Katherine is a research and field technician who graduated from OU with a dual B.S./B.A. in biology and Spanish, both with Honors. She grew up in Piedmont, Oklahoma and spent most of her childhood searching for and catching toads, frogs, turtles, horned lizards, and tarantulas before housing developments destroyed most of the suitable habitat around her parents’ property. After beginning her degree at OU as pre-med student, Katherine took Dr. Siler’s Herpetology class in spring 2019 and fell in love with field work and the idea of becoming a career herpetologist. She has been involved with the lab ever since–minus a semester studying in New Zealand–and completed an Honors Research Assistantship (HRAP) and her Honors thesis prior to graduation. She is currently working on an amphibian disease carrier study and interning on an NSF-funded Macrosystems and NEON project for which Dr. Siler is a co-PI. In addition, she is assisting with Texas horned lizard population monitoring on Tinker Air Force Base and statewide amphibian infectious disease surveys. Katherine plans to pursue a career in conservation research and hopes to study the amphibian and reptile biodiversity of Central and South America.