Karen completed her undergraduate degree in Biology with minors in Biochemistry and Plant Science at the University of Arizona. She went on to pursue her Ph.D. in Plant Biology at the University of California, Berkeley at the Joint Bioenergy Institute under the mentorship of Dr. Henrik Scheller. Her doctoral research focused on developing and applying novel single-cell and spatial RNA sequencing technologies to quantify gene expression from non-model plant and microbial species. Karen's thesis represents the first application of joint single-cell and spatial transcriptomics to study gene expression of a dual-kingdom symbiotic interaction (doi.org/10.1038/s41477-024-01666-3). After completing her Ph.D., Karen started working at Bayer as a post-doctoral scientist where she spent two years working on collaborative research between their Crop Science (St. Louis, MO, USA) and Pharmaceutical  (Berlin, Germany) divisions focused on genomic technology development.

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