Katie Amato wonders what it means to be human (she's a biological anthropologist)

As a child, Katie thrived in her suburban Chicago backyard, reading The Boxcar Children and leading her little brother on adventures. A second grade unit on Jane Goodall cemented her curiosity about primates, and two fantastic high school teachers excited her about biology. But it wasn't until college that she thought science could be a career.Now, Katherine Amato is a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University in Chicago. She studies how humans evolved, looking at their microbiome and the microbiome of primates, trying to figure out if bugs in our guts helped direct human evolution. She was also recently part of a team that published a fascinating research paper on the effect of juicing fruits and vegetables on the gut microbiome. (Spoiler: It isn't great for it.)Katie is a down-to-earth, curious person with two kids and a new puppy who wants to know how we can live to better support the ecosystem within our bodies, and how humans became what we are today.