Catherine Louise Kearney Squires (April 9, 1941 – August 3, 2021) was a microbiologist known for her work on ribosomal RNA using Escherichia coli as a model organism.
Squires grew up in Winters, California, and attended San Juan High School.
She moved to Dartmouth College in 1974, and subsequently accepted a position at Columbia University in 1977.
She began working on mutants of Escherichia coli while at University of California, Davis where she examined the temperature dependence of growth in the bacterium.
[11] Squires' research established a mutant of Escherichia coli (strain Δ7) which had all seven of its rrn operons removed.