Katya is an evolutionary biologist decoding how evolution shapes phenotypic diversity.
Katya earned her Ph.D. in 2022 at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Germany, in the group of Michael Hiller. She studied how some birds, like hummingbirds, can consume huge amounts of sugar and avoid detrimental consequences like type 2 diabetes.
Katya then moved on to complete her postdoctoral training at Harvard University, where she explored broader questions of evolutionary convergence of extreme metabolic and behavioural adaptations in birds, working together with Timothy Sackton at the Informatics group.
Katya became a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in 2026. Her group studies how animals evolve a broad diversity of metabolic adaptations and how this knowledge can be used to design novel metabolic systems.
