Kathrine Whitman ’19 has been awarded a 2025 Knight-Hennessy scholarship to join an internationally competitive, multidisciplinary graduate fellowship and leadership program at Stanford University.
Knight-Hennessy scholars are selected “based on their demonstration of independence of thought, purposeful leadership, and a civic mindset.” Selected from a pool of 8,570 applicants, each of the 84 members of the 2025 cohort will receive up to three years of financial support to pursue graduate studies at Stanford and “prepare them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world.”
She is the second CMC alumna to earn the prestigious award, as Anoma Bhat ’14 was named to the inaugural Knight-Hennessy cohort in 2018.
Whitman is pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, having earned her B.A. in Neuroscience from CMC as a Bill and Melinda Gates Interdisciplinary Science Scholar. After graduating from CMC in 2019, she worked for the Umanath Memory & Aging Laboratory from 2022-2024.
“As a first-generation college student, I strongly feel this journey was shaped by the CMC mentorship I received from Dr. Sharda Umanath and many more CMC professors and staff,” said Whitman, who hails from Taft, Calif.
Now working in Stanford’s Lifespan Development Laboratory, Whitman examines “psychosocial lifespan development, individual and societal implications of increased longevity, intergenerational affinity, and aging perceptions.”
Prior to her Ph.D. studies, Whitman served in Copenhagen for the DIS study-abroad program’s science and health department. Before joining the Umanath Memory & Aging Lab at CMC to study semantic knowledge, Whitman conducted research on late-life suicide at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
She recently contributed a chapter to the textbook Psychology of Aging, and shares her research at academic conferences and through a variety of initiatives. Whitman was also awarded the Stanford EDGE fellowship for Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education.