Laura Aline Katz is an American biologist who is the Elsie Damon Simonds Professor of Biological Sciences at Smith College.
[1][2][3] She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard College and her PhD from Cornell University.
She also established the Katz Laboratory which focuses on "elucidating principles of evolution through reconstruction of evolutionary trees, community sampling of diverse microorganisms from local environments and analyses of genome evolution.
[8] She later received a five-year $1.2 million grant to closely examine the evolutionary relationships among 200 eukaryotic microbes.
[10] In 2019, Katz was awarded a $443,222 grant from the National Science Foundation for her research project "Collaborative Proposal: Combining single-cell ‘omics’ and community analyses to reveal functional and genetic diversity in marine planktonic ciliates.