Kat Vandy
Dr. Kat Gardner-Vandy is an Assistant Professor of Aviation and Space at Oklahoma State University. After obtaining her BS in Geology and private pilots license from the University of Oklahoma and PhD in Planetary Sciences from the University of Arizona, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in the Division of Meteorites. A citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, she is now the Principal Investigator of a NASA Science Activation program at OSU called Native Earth | Native Sky. Her research interests include Indigenous science curriculum development, pilot training and education, and melting in the early solar system. Dr. GV was a Goldwater Scholar while an undergraduate, a Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership and NASA Earth and Space Science fellow during her graduate studies, and was named a 40 Under 40 by The National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development in 2022.