Kathleen’s love of nature and science can be attributed to having grown up playing outdoors in rural Virginia and exposure to her father’s obsessive watching of PBS programming, back before there was any thought of putting a music soundtrack to wildlife films.  She has a background in conservation science, evolutionary biology, and molecular phylogenetics, which she now applies to One Health research.  Her work has spanned all manner of taxa and topics including leeches, shellfish diseases, herpesviruses, birds, and turtles, and has taken her to field sites including places in Kenya, Missouri, the Galapagos, and the Chesapeake Bay.  She uses molecular tools to tackle conservation issues, and as a proponent of capacity building strives to teach others the utility of such powerful tools in conservation work.  Her current work with Field Projects International involves writing for the blog One World Science and developing online course work to train the next generation of conservation scientists.