Meet Katie Schultz: How She’s Using a Master’s Degree to Propel Her Career in Biochemistry

Katie Schultz was in middle school when she first saw a model of an atom, the building block that makes up everything around us. Her curiosity led her to enroll in honors and AP chemistry classes in high school—and eventually to CU Denver for a master’s degree. “It just always made sense to me,” she said of the subject. “And I really liked the aspect of where chemistry becomes biology. I thought that was fascinating.”

Raised southwest of Denver in Conifer, Schultz pursued an undergraduate degree at Colorado School of Mines in chemistry with a focus in biochemistry, which looks at the chemical processes that happen within living organisms, like humans. Put simply, “I’m just a big ball of chemistry,” Schultz said. “I feel like so many people, when they think [about the] final frontier, they’re like, ‘Oh, let’s go to space. Let’s go to the bottom of the ocean. And for me, I just think there’s so much that we don’t know about the human body.” 

Schultz then landed a position as a research specialist at Ignite Proteomics, a startup company based in Golden that studies protein modifications in oncology, with a focus on breast cancer. Her supervisor quickly saw her potential and encouraged her to continue her education and pursue a master’s degree, which would give her career a boost.  

That’s when Schultz came across the work of Jeff Knight, a professor in CU Denver’s Department of Chemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the faculty director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities. “Knight’s lab also looks at protein modifications, though in the context of Type 1 diabetes,” Schultz said. “It just really resonated with me, both the research style that involved cell culture and antibody-based assays [tests], and also just with the fact that I have Type 1 diabetes in my family history.” 

She spent the next year and a half in Knight’s lab researching how certain proteins relate to insulin secretion, which helps regulate blood sugar, as well as inflammation and pre-Type 1 diabetes. She studied how changes and modifications to these proteins can lead to the development of diabetes. All the while, she continued to work at Ignite Proteomics but reduced her hours. “Dr. Knight was really flexible with me in terms of maintaining my job part-time outside of school,” Schultz said.  

Schultz discovered that her research at CU Denver and her job had more in common than she expected. “What’s interesting is that a lot of the proteins that are involved in what we’re interested in studying in terms of breast cancer are also involved in insulin signaling,” she said. She also got experience that she’ll take back to her role, like practice in every step of the scientific method, from developing a hypothesis to creating an experimental design to analyzing the data and writing grant proposals. And, she was a co-first author on a published research paper.  

Thanks to her achievements at CU Denver, after commencement she’ll continue her career at Ignite Proteomics—with a promotion in sight. “I will be, at some point in the near future, taking on the technical supervisor role,” she said, “which I’m able to get because of my master’s degree.”