Dr. Kat Gardner-Vandy was born in Tulsa, OK and raised in Broken Arrow, OK. She has mixed Native American and European ancestry and is a citizen of Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Kat is an Assistant Professor of Aviation and Space at Oklahoma State University. With an enthusiastic love of space and airplanes, Kat left home after high school to attend the University of Oklahoma, major in Geology, and obtain her private pilot’s license. Next, she moved to the University of Arizona where she completed a PhD in Planetary Sciences by studying meteorites and doing melting experiments. While at the U of A, Kat had the enormous blessing to work with other Native STEM scholars through the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership and learn about their traditional ways of knowing.

It was while a graduate student that Kat met her greatest mentor, Dr. Tim McCoy (citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma), who is the Curator of Meteorites at the Smithsonian Institution. Kat would go on to do a postdoc with Tim studying meteorites before settling back at home in Tulsa, OK with her family. Now as an Assistant Professor of Aviation and Space, Kat is the Principal Investigator of a NASA Science Activation program called Native Earth | Native Sky, a project with the goal of collaborating creating earth-sky STEM curriculum with three Native Nations in Oklahoma. She also enjoys studying student pilot training and intersectional diversity and inclusion in STEM, particularly earth and aerospace. Kat loves to groom horses with her daughter, play games with her three sons, spend time with her silly husband, and volunteer in the OSU pet therapy program with their sweet Goldendoodle.