Katherine Ember is author of 'Human/Nature', selected as the best essay of the EU-LIFE/Nature Essay Contest: Utopia Institute of Research. She received a 5,000€ prize and was given the opportunity to present her work at the Envisioning the research centres of the future conference.

Katherine is currently a research associate at Polytechnique Montreal and the CRCHUM medical research center in Montreal. Here, she is developing rapid ways of detecting diseases using laser light in biofluids like saliva. She was awarded three Quebecois postdoctoral fellowship awards for her work on laser-based COVID-19 and brain cancer detection. During her PhD in optical medical imaging at the University of Edinburgh, Katherine developed a chemical-free method for detecting liver damage. She carried out epigenetic research using fluorescence microscopy during her undergraduate masters in biochemistry at the University of Oxford. Katherine is passionate about communicating science to the general public and gives biophysics lectures at Polytechnique Montreal to graduate students.

To access Katherine's awarded essay, Tackling an early-morning crisis at the Institute of Merged Sciences, visit Nature's web page: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01855-8