Official Story
Cate holds a BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, where she did research in John Gabrieli's lab, working with Noam Sobel. She received her PhD in Psychology from New York University, working with Liz Phelps, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with BJ Casey at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College. She joined the faculty at Weill Cornell in 2014 and recently returned to NYU as an Assistant Professor. Her research examines how emotional learning and decision-making change as the brain develops from childhood to adulthood. Cate has received prestigious early-career awards including the NARSAD Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the APS Rising Stars Award, and the Klingenstein-Simons Neuroscience Fellowship.
Unofficial Story
Cate chose her major after discovering that in her fairly aimless sampling of classes, she had completed half of the Symbolic Systems major. She was drawn to neuroscience and after many fruitless inquiries, found a graduate student willing to take her on as a research assistant. The cognitive neuroscience research happening in the Gabrieli lab was exciting to her, but she found no PhD programs that featured this sort of training. Instead of graduate school, she moved to New York to join a fledgling AI startup as a software engineer, having oversold them on her level of programming skills. Within the next two years, the company grew ten times larger and then went bankrupt, after which Cate joined a few former colleagues working on algorithmic financial market prediction. The soullessness of this work gradually drove Cate back toward academia, where she discovered that human cognitive neuroscience had flourished in her absence. Cate had her first child midway through grad school. He was a colicky baby who barely slept and screamed constantly for nearly five months straight. Cate's graduate advisor was remarkably tolerant of her astonishing lack of productivity and generally poor cognitive functioning. Cate barely managed to publish one empirical paper before defending her dissertation. She then had another baby, and started her postdoc uptown three months later, once again sleepless and addled. Cate spent far too much time in her postdoc tying up loose ends from grad school and failed at all her attempts to obtain postdoctoral funding. However, she managed to publish some papers, and on the merits of this work (and possibly a touch of academic nepotism) she was promoted to a faculty position at Weill Cornell. Since her move downtown to NYU, her most substantive accomplishment has been the 50% reduction in her commuting time.