Kathryn received her BSc. and PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Sheffield. After being a laboratory manager for eleven years at the University of Leicester, she established the Cambridge Centre for Proteomics, University of Cambridge in 2001. She became the Professor in Cellular Dynamics in Department of Biochemistry University of Cambridge in 2012 and the Deputy Head of the Department of Biochemistry in 2023.

She directs a research programme focused on the development and application of technologies to study subcellular architecture and this changes upon cellular stresses. She is also interested in the cellular processes that control protein abundance. She applies her approaches to a very broad range of biological scenarios from vaccine safety to protein stability in extremophiles.

She was awarded the Juan Pablo Albar Proteome Pioneer Award from the European Proteomics Association in 2017 and received the HUPO Distinguished Achievements in Proteomics award in 2018. She is an elected member of EMBO and Academia Europaea.