Kathleen is the co-founder and CEO of Savor, a Bay Area startup working to decarbonize the global food system by producing delicious, carbon-neutral fats without any agricultural inputs. Fat and oil production account for more than 7% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and uses over 15% of our planet’s habitable land. Savor’s technology has the potential to mitigate virtually all of it while delivering deliciously rich, high-performance favorites like butter, cheese, ice cream, and more. Self-described as someone who is dazzled by human invention, Kathleen built her career around helping to reduce the negative impacts of our societal progress and innovation, while elevating our collective potential.     Prior to co-founding Savor, Kathleen spent her career outside of the food industry developing sustainability-enabling technologies. She served as a project director at Orca Sciences, a philanthropist-backed research and development organization focused on the energy and climate spaces. She also worked as a consultant evaluating the technical and economic viability of high-risk, high-reward climate solutions. Shortly after, Kathleen turned her focus to food. As she learned more about the industry’s outsized impact on the climate, she saw a massive opportunity to use the sustainability technologies she dedicated her career to building to combat this. Kathleen attended college at the young age of 16 and eventually found her way to MIT driven by a passion to make a meaningful difference in sustainability. Kathleen earned a PhD in Materials Science & Engineering from MIT where she held multiple fellowships. Kathleen grew up in Corvallis, OR and currently resides in the Bay Area. In the rare times she is not working, Kathleen loves to spend time outdoors where you might find her taking immense pleasure from looking at unusual plants.

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