Katherine is chief of Science Advancement and Outreach (SAO) at PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). SAO aims to change the paradigm of biomedical research by promoting the development & implementation of cutting-edge strategies in biomedical research & training & eliminating the use of animals in experimentation. Katherine earned her bachelor’s degrees in biology psychology from Syracuse University and her Ph.D. in experimental psychology and cognitive science from the University of California–San Diego. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, she went on to become a research fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health, where she stayed for eight years. Over the course of her research career, she studied the neural correlates of linguistic, spatial, & memory processes, working with children with early focal brain injury, adults & children with schizophrenia, and individuals with Williams syndrome and related genetic disorders. Katherine has more than 20 years of experience conducting brain and neuroimaging research with humans and is an expert at experimental design and data analysis. She has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and has presented her findings at national and international industry conferences.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”
Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:29 Katherine's Intro - from neuroscience and the NIH to PETA
- "About half of biomedical research... involves very invasive procedures with animals"
- "It became clear to me that that assumption... that the harms we were doing were justifiable... fell apart... the harms were much greater than I realised but also... there's a lot of species differences that make data from these labs difficult to translate into benefits for humans."
- "Then the question becomes... well what are we doing?"
- "Trying to make sure people realise how sentient these animals really are... they have their own needs & wants & desires"
- Previous episodes with Ingrid Newkirk https://youtu.be/M7Ac2Ba2jbM & Aysha Akhtar https://youtu.be/EZ_gh0ldzpo
04:55 What's Real?
- "Religious but not deeply religious" parents - Anglican, episcopalian Christians
- "It never really took"
- Not needing external reasons for "wanting to cause as little harm as possible and to live in harmony with the world around us"
- Learning about animals through science "started to change the way I viewed them"
24:54 What & Who Matters?
46:49 How Can We Make a Better Future?

...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall via this simple form.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on FaceBook. Come join us there!