Environmental Scientist & Epidemiologist

Dr. Kathryn (Katie) Fiorella is an environmental scientist and epidemiologist, and her research aims to understand the interactions among environmental change and community well-being, food systems, and nutrition. Her work is focused on global fisheries and the people that use these environmental resources to provide food and income. Katie uses interdisciplinary methods and her work aims to foster a deeper understanding of how ecological and social systems interact, the ways communities and households adapt to and mitigate environmental change, and the links between human well being and ecological sustainability.

Katie's work has been funded by NSF, USAID, National Geographic and more, and she has published more than 45 peer-reviewed journal articles. She is a co-editor of the book, Foundations of Socio-Environmental Research: Legacy Readings with Commentaries, which is an anthology of 53 foundational readings tracing the history of socio-environmental research from the late 1700s onward.

Katie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health at Cornell University, and she leads the Food Systems and Health Concentration area of the Master of Public Health Program. She is a Faculty Fellow of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and the Center for Health Equity, and a core faculty member of the Southeast Asia Program. She holds a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy & Management and a Master of Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley, and an AB in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University.