Kate Harris, Polartec Challenge winner, honored as a 2010 Woman of Discovery

WINGS WorldQuest is an organization that “celebrates and supports extraordinary women explorers and promotes scientific exploration, education, and conservation to inspire future generations.” On Thursday, April 15, WINGS will honor the accomplishments of visionary women who are pushing the boundaries of knowledge to help us understand the complex issues we face today at the 8th annual Women of Discovery Awards.

Kate Harris, who is a recipient of a Polartec Challenge Grant this year along with Mel Yule, is one of the four WINGS winners this year.

Kate, at only 27, has an impressive academic resume, combined with a unquenchable thirst for adventure. Her undergraduate degree is from UNC, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar in biology. After graduation in 2006, she retraced Marco Polo’s travels along China’s Silk Road. On this trip, she and two friends traversed the Aksai Chin in western Tibet, a contested territory between India and China, and in the process biked near the Siachen glacier on the Indian-Pakistan Line of Control. The notion that these sublime wildernesses were venues for military occupation and violence, because of arbitrary human borders, was shocking. This experience sparked her interest in the geopolitics of transboundary wilderness conservation. After this expedition, Kate went to the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She wrote her Master’s dissertation on the potential for transboundary science and environmental conservation to resolve conflict and cultivate peace between neighboring nations. Her work explored the prospects for establishing a peace park on the Siachen glacier in Kashmir, and drew on historical precedents for science-for-peace initiatives in Antarctica, Outer Space, and transboundary protected areas in Africa, South America, and Asia.

Kate just completed her Master’s degree in geobiology at MIT and is now taking a year off to complete an ambitios project called Cycling Silk, a year-long, all-woman bike journey that will cover more then 10,000 kilometers of the Silk Road between Tibet and Turkey, and study six case studies for cross-border conservation along the way.

Congrats Kate! We’re all looking forward to reading your upcoming updates from the Silk Road!