Catherine Kallin is the Canada Research Chair in Quantum Materials Theory at McMaster University. She joined the McMaster faculty in 1984 after receiving her PhD in Physics from Harvard and completing a post-doctoral fellowship at Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. She has spent sabbaticals at Bell Labs, Cornell, UBC, and Stanford.

Catherine has held the Sloan, Steacie, and Guggenheim Fellowships and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Her field of study is novel electron behaviours in materials. Catherine has recently been named a Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics, the only Canadian among 14 North Americans in 2016 to receive this prestigious honour.