Katerina Gonzales is a climate scientist and postdoctoral fellow at University of Minnesota, working to bridge the gap between climate research and practice. She researches extreme weather events and works with science end-users to advance climate adaptation. Her current work engages Western water utilities to understand their needs and practices around communicating precipitation impacts from atmospheric rivers. Kat earned her Ph.D. in Earth System Science at Stanford University in 2021 where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Stanford Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence (DARE) fellow. Born and raised in Colorado, she remembers growing up with wildfires erupting across the region in the summer, and warmer winters leading to more pine beetle tree deaths, altering the Western landscape she was raised to love. Her career mission is focused on strengthening communities to address the climate crisis through research, education, and service.