Katie Byrd

Katie Byrd grew up in North Carolina and earned a B.S. in Earth and Ocean Sciences and a Master of Arts in Teaching from Duke University. She was a National Science Foundation Robert Noyce Senior Fellow as a master's student. After graduation, Katie relocated to New York City and taught for five years at the James Baldwin School in Manhattan. At Baldwin, Katie wrote and taught curriculum in climate change, urban ecology, nutrition, and astrobiology. She also developed and hosted the annual STEAM Nite, created fieldwork, and student research opportunities in collaboration with the NYC Department of Environmental Protection (How Healthy is the Gowanus Canal? 2014), the American Museum of Natural History (extremophile investigation, 2015), and NASA (How Can NYC Become More Climate Resilient? 2015-2016).

In 2015, Katie was awarded the Math for America Master Science Teacher Fellowship and in 2016 was a NASA Climate Change Research Initiative Teacher Fellow at the NASA GISS research center. Then, in her words, she got tired. And she quit. And she traveled to 32 countries over the course of a year. In 2017, Katie and her husband Sonny (a Govie alum) moved to South Carolina and she began teaching again. Now in her tenth year of teaching she thinks she has the best job in the world, talking about science (and life) with young people, who are just the perfect amount of weird and special.