Katie Pedersen is a doctoral candidate in Education Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, where she studies the role of social media in postsecondary planning and the intersections of education finance and other funding priorities. Her current projects examine the role of TikTok in college counseling and career exploration. She also studies and seeks to quantify the contributions of informal family caregivers, particularly in relation to state education budgets. Lastly, she is interested in the intersections between funding for public transportation and funding for public schooling.  

Before beginning her Ph.D. program, Katie worked as a secondary school teacher, instructional coach, and curriculum designer in Boston for three years and Antananarivo, Madagascar for one year. While teaching in Boston, she earned an Master of Education in Curriculum & Teaching from Boston University and was selected as a 2023-2024 Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA). Over two summers, she also worked as an AmeriCorps VISTA Summer Education Associate with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Wichita, Kansas, where she taught English as a Second Language (ESL) and math.  

In 2019, Katie graduated from Amherst College with a dual degree in political science and french. She was named as the winner of the political science department’s sole prize for senior theses. As an undergraduate student, she was selected for Amherst College’s Mellon Research Scholarship program and the U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) program.