Cat originally hails from Glenburn, Maine and graduated in 2012 from Stonehill College with a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience. After graduation, she worked in Bar Harbor, Maine at The Jackson Laboratory where she worked to establish mouse models of human neurodegenerative diseases. Cat conducted her doctoral research in the Lukens lab investigating the contributions of immune signaling to dysregulated neurodevelopment both in the context of the maternal immune activation model of autism spectrum disorder and in inflammasome-mediated purging of genomically compromised CNS cells. After finishing her PhD in Neuroscience at UVA, she conducted postdoctoral research in the lab of Peter Penzes at Northwestern University. Cat is now a senior scientist at Vanqua Bio in Chicago.