She received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work and was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Kathleen Donohue attended Stanford University, graduating in 1985 with bachelor's degrees in Biology and Medieval Studies.
[2] Her doctoral advisors were Ellen Simms and Stevan Arnold, and her dissertation was entitled "The evolution of seed dispersal in Cakile edentula var.
[3] In her early career, she was a faculty member at the Morgan School of Biological Sciences at the University of Kentucky and subsequently at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
She researches the genetic and ecological basis of adaptation, including phenotypic plasticity, maternal effects, epigenetics, niche construction, biological dispersal, natural selection at multiple scales.