Katie Hirono is President of the Society of Practitioners of Health Impact Assessment, an organisation dedicated to providing leadership and promoting excellence in the field of HIA. She is also a PhD candidate in the Global Public Health Unit at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on health impact assessment (HIA), health equity, policymaking and community engagement, power, and the social determinants of health. Katie is also a UK-based consultant on health impact assessment and has contributed to over 35 HIAs in the US, Australia, and the UK throughout her career. She is a former research associate at the Centre for Health Equity Training, Research and Evaluation at the University of New South Wales, Australia where she specialised in conducting, training and teaching HIA. Before joining UNSW, Katie worked for the Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to increase the use of health impact assessment in the U.S. Katie has also worked as a consultant to the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization in the department of Gender, Diversity and Human Rights, where she researched Indigenous health disparities in Latin America. During her master’s program at the University of Michigan School of Public Health she conducted qualitative research in Honduras using the Photovoice methodology. Her research assessed perceived barriers to healthcare and helped to inform the development of a community health system. She received a bachelor of arts in Social Relations and Spanish from Michigan State University and her master’s in public health from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She is the recipient of the University of Edinburgh Principal's Career Development Scholarship, U.S. Department of State Foreign Language Acquisition Studies Fellowship, and the University of Michigan School of Public Health Dean’s Award.