Graduate student in bacteriology
To Catherine Pettinger, UW–Madison is a place of opportunity.
It’s not only the opportunity for her research, which aims to understand how to remediate water contamination by focusing on how metals and microbes interact in a uranium-contaminated aquifer. It’s also everything else that campus offers.
“If there is something you want to see, do, or experience in graduate school, you can,” Catherine said. “Whether that is organizing an entire event so you can compare and contrast career opportunities or to try sailing with Hoofers, you can try almost anything here.”
Catherine is the Outreach and Symposium Coordinator for the Molecular and Environmental Toxicology (METC) student committee. She’s mentored undergraduates and first-year graduate students, planned outreach and volunteer communities, and planned the now-annual METC Symposium. Through these experiences, she has developed the leadership skill of recognizing something needs to be done — and doing it.
Catherine’s advisor Erica L.-W. Majumder, assistant professor of bacteriology, said that in addition to doing a great job with her research, Catherine has been a fantastic research mentor, teaching assistant, and student leader. Catherine said her mentorship philosophy centers on truly and deeply listening.
“Listening to understand is a skill I continue to work on and drives much of the work we do and how we do it. This considers the person as a whole and working with them on how they can grow as a scientist and citizen of the world,” she said. “I think a lot of the scientific method can become lost if we only assign mentees tasks to perform. There is so much that goes into an experiment before the experiment begins! Observations, hypotheses, experimental design, analysis, etc. can and should be discussed to integrate the mentee into the entire process.”
Catherine came to UW–Madison because of the people.
“Of graduate schools I toured, the students at UW–Madison in our program seemed the happiest,” she said. “Of course, I considered other aspects of the school prior to applying, but when choosing between graduate schools at the end, the fact that people had rich, balanced lives helped sell the school and program I chose.”