Katherine Hennessey joined the Lafayette Athletics staff as the assistant director for student-athlete success in August 2024.
Hennessey is coming off a two-year stint as a graduate research assistant and a teaching assistantship at Lehigh. She helped Dr. Amardeep Singh with a collaborative research project titled "Responsible Datasets in Context: Collaboratively Designing for Ethical Humanities Data Education," which was funded by the Mozilla Responsible Computing Challenge agency. In her role, she worked toward creating datasets from periodicals and transcribed poetry to upload to a more accessible audience. While teaching, she instructed 20 students weekly in English 001 and 002.
"We are so excited for Kate to join our team. Her unique background as a student-athlete combined with her experiences in teaching and research will be an amazing asset to our student-athlete success programs," said Carly Riepenhoff, the Senior Associate Athletic Director for Student-Athlete Success. "We look forward to her contributions to the department and college community."
The St. Louis, Mo. native will provide support to all facets of the academic support service programs and student-athlete development initiatives for each of the 23 varsity sports teams, including advising on academic matters and support, academic coaching, providing educational programs, scheduling and monitoring study hall sessions, academic progress, degree completion, leadership education, community engagement, and student-athlete involvement.
A former NCAA Division III cross country and track & field athlete, Hennessey graduated from DePauw in 2022, earning a bachelor of arts degree in English Literature and a minor in Global French Learning. She then received her master of arts in English Literature at Lehigh in 2024. As a student-athlete, Hennessey earned a selection to the Indoor All-Conference NCAC Track and Field squad, the All-Conference NCAC Cross Country Team and the won DePauw's Track Female Newcomer of the Year award. In the classroom, she garnered All-Academic Women's Cross Country Team honors in 2019.
Updated Aug. 2024
