Dr Katie O’Brien is a Marie Curie Global Research Fellow at the Department of Physiology,
Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge and the University of California, San Diego.
She completed her doctorate in 2017 on metabolic profile changes and effects of dietary nitrate
supplementation in hypoxia at King’s College London under the direction of Professor Stephen
Harridge. During this time, she was a scientific investigator on the Xtreme Everest 2 research
expedition.

Following this, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher investigating drug induced mitochondrial
toxicity in the context of hypoxia in the group of Dr Andrew Murray, University of Cambridge and in
collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca. The aim of her current Fellowship is to
characterise the high-altitude metabolic phenotype driven by unique Andean genetics.