Katy Densmore has spent her career at the intersection of conservation, technology, and organizational leadership, helping mission-driven organizations set direction, build partnerships, and grow their impact. Her love of the natural world goes back to childhood camping trips throughout California. Years later, she passed this love on to her own kids on camping trips in Virginia.
Katy spent nearly a decade at The Nature Conservancy in senior strategy and operations roles. She helped shape the organization’s long-term conservation goals, led operations for its North America Region, and worked closely with trustees, donors, and policymakers to advance its priorities. She also managed TNC’s climate partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund and helped bring conservation leaders, business leaders, and policymakers together around shared goals.
Her work has also taken her into conservation technology. At Impact Observatory, she helped bring AI-generated global land cover maps to conservation organizations, governments, and businesses, and partnered with leading technology and satellite companies to put that data in more hands. Most recently, she has worked with energy companies and their engineering and consulting partners to reduce methane emissions using industrial AI.
Katy began her career as a mechanical engineer at ExxonMobil, where she held engineering, research, and management roles across refining and chemicals. That experience gave her a practical understanding of how large organizations make decisions, and how data and science can influence those decisions.
She brings a variety of governance experience to NatureServe. Katy served on the board of the Northern Virginia Conservation Trust for nine years, including as Board Chair, where she led the land trust’s first strategic plan and helped expand its conservation and fundraising. She serves on the advisory committee of Families in Nature and has held national and regional leadership roles with the Society of Women Engineers. She is also a longtime practitioner of systems thinking in complex organizations.
Katy holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Rice University and lives in Arlington, Virginia.
