Katie Rondem

Katie grew up in the Atlanta area and studied production and journalism at the University of Georgia. Following graduation, she spent the summer camping around the west in search of a place to settle and eventually landed amongst the mountains of Utah.

After discovering an interest in biology later in life, she went back to school at the University of Utah for a degree in Cell and Molecular Biology, followed by a masters in Evolutionary Biology from Cornell where she studied the molecular pathways responsible for butterfly wing color patterning. After grad school, she moved back to Utah and worked at the high-throughput sequencing core at the Huntsman Cancer Institute before becoming the English Lab's lab manager.

She loves living in Salt Lake with her husband and their animals (Blueberry the cat and Pop Tart the dog), and when she’s not outside hiking, skiing, or camping she's probably on the couch reading anything fantasy-related.

Research

Katie is refining the VEGAS platform. She is optimizing the methods we use for quantification, evolution, screening, and hit chasing to enable high-throughput applications of the VEGAS technique to a number of GPCR-focused evolution campaigns.