Kate White
Associate Director of Quantitative Cellular Imaging
Kate L White, Ph.D. is the Associate Director for Quantitative Cellular Imaging at the Allen Institute for Cell Science and started this position in November 2025.
Kate joined the Allen Institute after spending 4.5 years as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Quantitative and Computational Biology at the University of Southern California. Her group focused on developing new approaches for quantifying insulin maturation within pancreatic beta cells. The group used multiple imaging strategies such as cryo-electron microscopy, soft X-ray tomography, and live cell imaging. She was also the Director of the Pancreatic Beta Cell Consortium which is an international consortium united on developing new experimental and computational approaches for whole cell modeling.
Kate obtained her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill under the mentorship of Bryan Roth. She investigated biased signaling of the kappa opioid receptor to explore new avenues for non-addictive pain therapeutics. She also gained an interest in structure-based design of chemogenetic tools to further explore and understand cell biology. Kate went on to do her postdoctoral work with Ray Stevens at the Scripps Research Institute to focus on GPCR structural biology. After a couple years, she shifted gears to focus on single cell structure and its relationship to cell function. She developed imaging approaches, such as soft X-ray tomography, to quantify protein hormone maturation in secretory granules within single cells.
Kate is excited to bring her experience with quantitative imaging and passion for cell biology to CellScapes.
