Kathy Kahn is a Senior Program Officer in the Agricultural Development group at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she has worked since 2007. She manages grants focused on crop improvement and discovery research addressing the needs of small holder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Kahn trained as a plant biologist, and previously served as an advisor for international agricultural biotechnology issues with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service. Kahn has a PhD in molecular biology and biochemistry, and her research focused on light-harvesting and signal transduction in cyanobacteria (University of Missouri, Kansas City, USA), molecular genetics of disease resistance in Arabidopsis (Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich, UK), and virus resistance in cassava (Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, St Louis, USA). She is a dual national of the United States and the United Kingdom