2025 Talented 12: Kat Knauer

When she was growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, Katrina Knauer—who usually goes by Kat—always cared deeply about the environment. In middle school, she won a state science fair by presenting pet-safe ways to deter fire ants. But after working in a polymer science laboratory as a chemical engineering major at Florida State University, she found the environmental cause she’d devote her career to: solving the plastic waste crisis.

Plastics have transformed our quality of life, but they’ve also created a great deal of waste and pollution in the environment, Knauer says. She wants to help scientists reckon with that problem and do better in the future. “With great performance comes great responsibility,” she says.

Knauer is now shouldering that responsibility as a senior researcher at the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). She is the chief technology officer of Bio-Optimized Technologies to Keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment (BOTTLE), a multi-institution research consortium led by NREL. The BOTTLE consortium focuses on figuring out ways to recycle existing tough-to-recycle plastics and developing future polymers that are easily recyclable.

“She’s definitely a powerhouse. She’s just got enormous energy and enthusiasm,” says Sarah Morgan of the University of Southern Mississippi, Knauer’s PhD adviser. Knauer was one of her most productive graduate students, Morgan says: she published five first-author papers, launched an initiative to improve recycling access on campus, interned at Solvay, participated in an international research exchange in India, and struck up collaborations with Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories for neutron-scattering experiments.

After earning her PhD in 2016, Knauer wanted to work somewhere where she could pursue her passion for sustainable polymer research. Her first position was at the chemical giant BASF, where she learned how large companies operate and how to make a business case for sustainability projects. In 2019, Knauer joined what she describes as an “amazing group of women” at the recycling start-up Novoloop. The company needed a polymer chemist to help it turn polyethylene waste into new products. Not long after, she met Gregg Beckham and Michelle Reed, who recruited her to NREL to work with them on the BOTTLE consortium.

At BOTTLE, Knauer collaborates with consumer product companies such as Amazon, Procter & Gamble, and Kraft Heinz to figure out what sustainability challenges consortium scientists could help them solve. “Kat is an idea machine,” Beckham says, and her broad experience makes her especially effective at leading projects across sectors and disciplines.

The first big project Knauer led for BOTTLE was a collaboration with Amazon focused on recycling mixed polyesters, which included both petroleum-based and biobased plastics. She and her team developed a way to break down the polymers with an amine catalyst in methanol and recover the monomers. The project spawned a start-up, EsterCycle, in 2024. Working on a project that grew from a concept to a business in 3 years was an amazing experience, Knauer says, especially witnessing Julia Curley grow from a postdoctoral researcher into the company’s CEO.

Other BOTTLE projects Knauer has worked on include studying how microgravity affects plastic-eating microbes’metabolism, collaborating with outdoor apparel and gear maker Patagonia on recycling textiles and dyes, and developing biodegradable fibers with outdoor company The North Face.

Knauer says her job is “the perfect intersection” between fundamental and commercial research. Her projects often combine aspects of polymer chemistry, engineering, catalysis, and even sometimes microbiology. She learns a little bit about a lot of topics, she says. “I feel like I’m becoming 2 miles wide and 2 centimeters deep sometimes.”

Knauer is passionate about uplifting the next generations of chemists and engineers—particularly women. The only way we’re going to solve big problems like plastic waste is if we invest in the people who are going to build that future, she says. As a leader, she hopes to model empathy and kindness, which aren’t typically associated with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, she says.

She’s heartened by how much more support there is for sustainability in chemistry and engineering since she started working in the field—both in terms of how much companies want to invest in this type of research and how many young people want to work on it. “This wave just got so big, and I'm on it for as long as I possibly can be.”