National Postdoctoral Association

Cathee Johnson Phillips, M.A., serves as the executive director of the National Postdoctoral Association (NPA), headquartered in Washington, D.C. She manages operations of the 501(c)3 nonprofit association, which works to develop and promote national policies and programming that benefit the postdoctoral community and thereby the entire U.S. research community. Among her duties, she serves as the principal investigator for the NPA's project, "From Postdoc to Faculty: Transition Issues for Women Scientists," funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE Partnerships for Adaptation, Implementation, and Dissemination (PAID) Award. She also serves as project director for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Outstanding and Emerging Postdoctoral Entrepreneur Awards program and for the NPA projects funded by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Sloan Foundation.

Johnson Phillips regularly facilitates sessions or presents at universities and conferences across the country regarding the postdoc situation, including gender and diversity issues, the NPA itself, the NPA Core Competencies, and other topics. Among recent engagements, she organized and facilitated a workshop at the NSF about broadening participation in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences postdoctoral community; co-presented at the Arkansas Science and Technology Authority EPSCoR Project Annual Conference regarding the implementation of that project's mentoring plan; and served as facilitator for the NSF Division of Science Resources Statistics (SRS) Human Resources Expert Panel that reviewed the draft of the instrument for the new Early Career Researchers Survey.

Johnson Phillips holds a master's degree in leadership from Bellevue University and a bachelor's degree from Morningside College. Her background is in higher education and non-profit organizational management, including but not limited to strategic planning, grant development, and project management.