Key Takeaways
- Kate Knudsen graduated from the University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC) with a doctoral degree in 2025.
- An extensive travel portfolio of over 35 countries offers Kate a perspective and a deeper understanding of people and human nature.
- As a lifelong learner, Kate drew from her travels, her parents’ and children’s education modules, and even their careers for motivation in her doctoral pursuits.
- Her decision to return to school after a significant gap in her educational journey did not detract from her progress, nor her achievements.
- Kate applies her ideas to her career by incorporating key skills she learned at UAGC to her past and current professional roles.
UAGC Alum Kate Knudsen Sees the World Through Science
As a seasoned traveler, there’s one thing UAGC graduate Dr. Kate Knudsen loves doing on her adventures: visiting grocery stores in other countries.
This glimpse into an everyday aspect reveals as much about a population’s lifestyle and history as the destination itself, a detail of travel that Kate always finds fun.
“That's where people go to shop and to eat and to make meals at home,” she says. “It's a peek into what real life might be like in those countries.”
That instinct to look beyond the surface and understand how people, systems, and environments interact also defines how Kate moves through her career. As chief of staff to the CEO of a major medical device manufacturer, she operates at the intersection of strategy, communication, and organizational alignment. Her doctorate from UAGC sharpened that lens.
"UAGC challenged me to level up. Because of UAGC, I feel more confident in everything.”
By seeing the world through her own eyes, and subsequently the eyes of others, Kate maintains perspective on her career and how her degree applies to her personal and professional life.
“Traveling is such a good way to remind ourselves that the world's pretty big, and people are really the same everywhere, so it teaches patience and kindness and awareness, in ways that are really hard to get by sitting in your own city or state,” she explains.
Her pursuits remain rooted in curiosity and purpose, from her travel to her education and leadership. With more than 25 years in biomechanics and a doctorate that continues to inform her approach, Kate is still finding new ways to contribute, evolve, and stay energized by the work ahead.
Inspiration Near and Far
Kate sees the world with a fervor. Her travel experience is widespread, with more than 35 countries explored so far, with her most recent being a work trip to China. By far, one of her favorite trips was boating through the Seychelles, a remote island cluster off the coast of Madagascar. Kate’s father and brother are both certified captains, making it easy and thrilling to charter sailboats during the 48-hour trek to get to this remote and stunning place.
“I have a really adventuresome family, and we are lucky enough to be able to travel to a bunch of different places,” she says, noting that she does most of her travel with her husband and now-adult children.
As both her travel and life constants, Kate found inspiration — and even help with her coursework — from her children. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, her younger son took AP high school classes in calculus and physics, topics she re-learned in order to provide proper homework help. Immersing herself in that environment made Kate realize something important: she could achieve success in an online learning setting herself.
“If I can do distance learning, vicariously through him, I can clearly do distance learning,” she recalls.
Ultimately, it was her own children’s studies, coupled with the ease of online programs, that kick-started her experience in online learning. As a woman in STEM, one of her areas of focus was queer people in STEM, a reflection on her oldest child who identifies as non-binary. Their help extended beyond inspiration, as they were able to assist with Kate’s research while in her doctoral program.
“My oldest ended up being my statistician because of their background in computer science and math, so I was lucky enough to have somebody who could program computer science stats in my own house,” she explains.
A Life Spent Learning
Kate always knew she would earn her doctoral degree. She describes each step of her education as a “pivot,” where she jumped from a bachelor’s degree in biology to her master’s degree in biomedical engineering, away from her original path to become a doctor, to stay in the field that she had fallen in love with.
Among these distinctions, Kate’s motivation for studying medicine in the interest of helping others through the associated technology in her field.
“The reason I went into biomedical engineering was the ability to help patients, so to really make a difference, ultimately, in all of our lives in one form or fashion, because whether it's us or our parents or another loved one, medical devices touch everybody, all the time,” she explains.
“I think traveling is such a good way to remind ourselves that the world is pretty big and people are really the same everywhere. It teaches patience and kindness and awareness in ways that's really hard to get by sitting in your own city or state.”
After completing her master’s degree from the University of California, Davis, Kate took time off to pivot in life itself. External circumstances, like her husband studying in another city and moving states for marriage, delayed her program enrollment until years later. Her youngest child graduating and leaving for college opened her schedule to this opportunity.
“We were getting ready to be at that empty nest syndrome, and I realized I was going to have some free time, so what a good way to use it up,” she says.
While she is the first member of her family to achieve this level of education, the rest of Kate’s family is no stranger to similar pursuits. Her mother earned her master’s degree in architecture during Kate’s secondary years, while her father holds multiple degrees across subject matters, which he pursued whenever he wanted “to learn something new,” she says.
“In continuing to learn, lots of stuff can be picked up from reading books or from listening to podcasts, but the formal process of education has some real science behind it, and I think that's important,” Kate explains.
Living Her Dream
Kate continues to shape her professional reality around passion and interest. She currently works as the Chief of Staff to the CEO of Intuitive Surgical, a company that makes robotic surgical devices for soft tissue surgeries.
While she has only been in her current role for less than a year, the transition timed perfectly with the culmination of her doctoral studies, which prepared her for a diverse set of daily tasks that emphasize strong leadership qualities and organization.
“A lot of my day is talking to people and hearing what's happening within the company and figuring out how we make sure the right groups are connected,” she explains, “but also that the right priorities are resourced, and that people are getting the ear they need to move things forward.”
Her impact preceding this role holds similar prestige. Prior to this position, she worked as a senior director in product operations enablement, as part of her decades-long stint in the field of biomechanical specialties.
Kate also started an internal “university” at Intuitive Surgical that serves as a formal process for onboarding train engineering and design teams. This program provides a space for team members and employees to flourish with the proper education and resources to thrive in their respective roles.
Always Academia
Kate describes her UAGC experience as a fulfilling one that gave her the confidence to tackle adventures and challenges beyond the classroom.
“UAGC challenged me to level up,” she says. “Because of UAGC, I feel more confident in everything.”
Her two biggest UAGC takeaways to her work, leadership skills, and change management expertise, proved essential to her job responsibilities.
“Understanding the complexities of people dealing with change, and of groups dealing with change, and then some tips and tricks on how to help navigate that— I think that was incredibly beneficial,” she says.
Even now, Kate plans to expand on her work to help others. She hopes to contribute journalistic articles to various publications or shorten her doctoral research for submission to peer-reviewed journals. By converting her findings and interests into public-facing projects, covering topics in queer STEM professionals and her engineering expertise, she hopes that similar groups will resonate.
“I think there's something there about helping minorities in particular, women or queer, in situations that are hard, and how they might use these tools to build that psychological capital in a way that they can power through and help themselves,” she says.