Kathryn Linn Cottingham is a Professor of Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society in the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College.
[2] Cottingham played Lacrosse in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division III Tournament during her first season and was on the team that won the 1988 Middle Atlantic Conference championship.
[4][5] She was one of the first cohort of postdoctoral researchers at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, where she developed early warning indicators and ways to study community dynamics.
[6] Cottingham showed that cyanobacterial blooms create their own optimised environments, driving nitrogen and phosphorus cycling in otherwise low nutrient lakes.
Her 2012 research on pregnant women's rice consumption and arsenic exposure was selected by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) as one of the most important papers of the year.