Prior to her NSC appointment she served as the special assistant to the assistant secretary for international organization affairs at the U.S. Department of State and as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Katz lived in Korea for two years as a Fulbright grantee and spent a year in Japan studying at Stanford University's Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies. Her passion for East Asian affairs stems from the six years she spent as a teenager living in Australia, where her high school in Melbourne offered opportunities to study Japanese and travel to the region.
Katz received a master's degree in East Asian and international security studies from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where she was awarded the John C. Perry Scholarship for East Asian Studies, and a bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, in international relations and Japanese from the University of Pennsylvania. She currently resides in the Chicago area with her husband and two daughters and is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science Department at Northwestern University.
