Catherine is a professor in the Department of Biology at McGill University in Montreal where she holds the Canada Research Chair on Climate Change Mitigation and Tropical Forest (Tier 1). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Catherine served as Panama’s negotiator of REDD in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (2005-2009). She led  the Sustainable Canada Dialogues, an initiative that mobilizes scholars from across Canada to propose a blueprint for Canada’s transition to a low carbon economy.