Katy completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh before moving to CELL to take the MRes, for which she won the Drapers' Company Postgraduate Prize and the Marjorie Thompson Prize for Outstanding Academic Achievement in 2004. Katy's PhD, awarded in November 2009, was entitled Anne, Lady Bacon: A Life in Letters.

She is now Early Modern Record Specialist at The National Archives. As well as continuing her research into Anne Bacon, she is also investigating the status of the King James Bible as evidence in inheritance disputes in the seventeenth-century, and drawing together a survey of women's letters held at The National Archives.