Kat Gardner-Vandy

Dr. Kat Gardner-Vandy (citizen of Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) is an Associate Professor of Aviation and Space in the School of Educational Foundations, Leadership and Aviation. She is a Geologist (BS 2005, University of Oklahoma), Planetary Scientist (PhD 2012, University of Arizona), and private pilot (2005). Before coming to OSU in 2018 as a Teaching Assistant Professor, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in the Division of Meteorites, a STEM Lab Instructor at Tulsa Community College, and an adjunct professor at OSU. Dr. GV is the Principal Investigator of the Native Earth | Native Sky program (previously funded by the NASA Science Activation program and now supported by Boeing). She is the President of the OSU Native American Faculty and Staff Association and was named a Native American 40 Under 40 by the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development in 2022 and a Sequoyah Fellow of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society in 2025.

Research Interests:

Dr. Gardner-Vandy's research interests include STEM curriculum development with Native American nations, student pilot training, pilot weather data collection, meteoritics, cosmochemistry, and experimental petrology.