Kat Knauer

When she was growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, Katrina Knauer—who usually goes by Kat—always cared deeply about the environment. In middle school, she won a state science fair by presenting pet-safe ways to deter fire ants. But after working in a polymer science laboratory as a chemical engineering major at Florida State University, she found the environmental cause she’d devote her career to: solving the plastic waste crisis.Plastics have transformed our quality of life, but they’ve also created a great deal of waste and pollution in the environment, Knauer says. She wants to help scientists reckon with that problem and do better in the future. “With great performance comes great responsibility,” she says. Knauer is now shouldering that responsibility as a senior researcher at the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). She is the chief technology officer of Bio-Optimized Technologies to Keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment (BOTTLE), a multi-institution research consortium led by NREL. The BOTTLE consortium focuses on figuring out ways to recycle existing tough-to-recycle plastics and developing future polymers that are easily recyclable.“She’s definitely a powerhouse. She’s just got enormous energy and enthusiasm,” says Sarah Morgan of the University of Southern Mississippi, Knauer’s PhD adviser. Knauer was one of her most productive graduate students, Morgan says: she published five first-author papers, launched an initiative to improve recycling access on campus, interned at Solvay, participated in an international research exchange in India, and struck up collaborations with Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories