Dr. Katharine Donato holds the Donald G. Herzberg Chair in International Migration and is Director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research addresses questions related to global migration.

Her most recent work are two articles on the use of organic big data to predict forced migration in The International Migration (co-authored with Lisa Singh, Ali Arab, Elizabeth Jacobs, and Nathan Wycoff); and edited volumes on the landscape of U.S. legal migration and refugee integration in Canada, Europe and the United States. Her books include Refugees, Migration and Global Governance: Negotiating the Global Compacts (2019, with Elizabeth Ferris) , and Gender and International Migration: From the Slavery Era to the Global Age (2015, with Donna Gabaccia). She is the Principal Investigator on a project about the assimilation and mobility experiences of U.S. immigrant adults who entered as unaccompanied children. She is also co-Principal Investigator on a project that examines how environmental conditions affect out-migration from communities in southwestern Bangladesh.

Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, she was on the faculty of Vanderbilt and Rice Universities. She holds a Ph.D. from SUNY-Stony Brook.