Scientist, Mountaineer, Trailblazer

By Thomas Danahy, Belmont Hill School

At 11 pm on a cold July night in the Karakoram mountain range of Pakistan, Dr. Kristin Bennett had reached “the bottleneck,” the most dangerous section of the deadliest mountain in the world-K2. The bottleneck is a narrow couloir situated underneath blocks of glacial ice the size of small buildings, which, with a slight change of temperature, could fall at any moment. Part of the way through, Kristin came face to face with a burly Pakistani Sherpa climbing down the path. In the most treacherous part of the mountain, the Sherpa demanded Kristin unclip from her static line to let him pass, the only thing keeping her from falling 1,300 feet straight down the mountain, to let the man pass. Because of the man’s size, Dr. Bennett could not clip around him, so this maneuver would be extremely risky. However Kristin refused to clip around. She yelled at the Sherpa that she would not endanger herself like that just because he said so. “For me, it was life-changing. It was really clear that I could stand up for myself and that I mattered. And no one was going to bully me no matter what. And I'm strong,” Kristin says. Kristin went on to summit K2 that following morning, becoming just the third American woman to reach this pinnacle of mountaineering. Summiting what many consider the hardest mountain to climb on Earth is a very long endeavor, typically requiring months of conditioning, years of prior mountaineering experience, and weeks of preparation and planning. You need to be ferociously strong-willed, tough as nails, and slightly insane. More people have been to space than have summited K2. 1 in 4 climbers who attempt to reach the summit die. Nevertheless when Kristin’s climbing partner, Kristin Harila, asked her to join a trek to Pakistan to summit both Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest mountain in the world, and K2, Kristin did not hesitate to jump onboard. When I asked Kristin about her K2 experience, she said, “and when I look at it, and I think about what I did, I feel sick.” Nonetheless, her fearlessness exemplified in her summit of K2 demonstrates her insatiable desire to learn and experience new things. As a scientist, CEO, and mountaineer, Kristin has been driven by courage and curiosity. She has navigated the unpredictability of her career without a roadmap, embracing each experience as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Kristin has never had a plan. Although the way she has navigated her incredible career, involving so many unique places, people, and studies, seems carefully calculated, Kristin has taken each step on the path in her career solely by taking a chance. She has summited the two highest mountains in the world and she has been on the cutting edge of scientific discoveries. She has navigated her way through the world of science, building neutron diffractometers, defusing warheads, helping earn billions of dollars worth of grants from the government, guided by her love of learning, optimism, perseverance, and willingness to take a chance. She has always sought to challenge herself and to follow her passions, letting her internal compass guide her through adventures all over the world. Her career’s success has been an incredible blend of intellect and spontaneity. In science, mountaineering, and leadership, her instinct and intuition have guided her, helping her accomplish unparalleled feats.

Dr. Kristin Bennett grew up in Malibu, California, but, she shares, not the Katy Perry, Barbie, Disney Channel Malibu. She grew up on a farm a couple miles from the coast. In her words, she “was born curious.” From a young age, she loved animals, and dreamed of being a veterinarian. On the farm, she lived with a menagerie of animals; her family had nine horses, two geese, five ducks, two dogs and two cats. She loved to be outside, growing up surfing, running with her parents, and hiking. Both of her parents were athletes and prioritized sports and outdoor activities in their children's lives. On their family vacations, they would not go to the city or to the beach, but instead would go hiking together. Kristin always wanted to try something new, which became a challenge sometimes. In one car ride with her mother, then ten-year-old Kristin was complaining about how she would not have enough time in the summer to do all the things that she wanted to do, to which her mother replied, “Kristin, you shouldn't complain. Some people don't know what they want to do, and they're bored. You're never going to be bored.” This became a key theme in her life, as no matter where she went, she always found new things to do and try. After her parents divorced, Kristin and her mother and siblings moved to Boston, where Kristin attended the Winsor School for high school. There, she captained the field hockey team and played lacrosse. At Winsor, Kristin discovered her love for math. She was very bright and one of the top students in her class. She wanted to be a math major in college, but in an impromptu conversation with her math professor at Winsor, he asked her if she knew anything about engineering. Suddenly, Kristin realized that engineering could allow her to work at the intersection of math and creativity. She also saw engineering as another subject she could fall in love with. Graduating from Winsor, Kristin set off down a new path of her life as a bright-eyed 18 year old, ready to take on a new challenge.

Kristin attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, eventually earning her Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering. She spent one year at Dartmouth College on a fellowship for women from the National Science Foundation, and another year in England at King’s College, London. Heading into Trinity, as a new Engineering student, Kristin did not know what to expect. In one of her first classes as a freshman, she took an Earth Physics class, where her math skills helped her excel. There, her class dove into geology, which brought Kristin back to her childhood. During her middle school days, she had a cousin who worked in the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, who would show her pictures of the Earth from space. Seeing these rare photographs made Kristin feel special, wanting to achieve something revolutionary and unique. This inspired Kristin to start learning about geology, and in this class she combined physics with geology, two of her interests, helping her realize that she could tackle many different sciences at once, which would become a key aspect of her career. During her time at Dartmouth, Kristin found home by the Connecticut River. She would spend significant time there, studying, kayaking, hanging out with friends, or simply clearing her mind. The lab she worked in was located just uphill from the river, where Kristin found another home. Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering was Kristin’s first step into real, interactive, science, putting her on the cutting edge of mechanical engineering. She worked in an ice lab, squeezing materials at high pressure to understand their reactions. “There was something about science, doing something hands-on that I really liked,” Kristin explains. A year later, at King’s College, Kristin began to realize that she was born to be a trailblaze; she was the only woman in a 85-person class in the Mechanical Engineering Program. She worked directly above Rosalind Franklin’s laboratory, who Kristin claims is her “kindred spirit.” Rosalind Franklin was a chemist in the early 1900s who helped discover the structure of DNA, which she found out via an X-ray crystallography diffractometer. In that lab Franklin took the X-ray, making a huge breakthrough in science. Although Kristin worked in engineering at the time, she later would become a crystallographer, a scientist who studies the formation of atoms in different substances, and she would be elected to be on the United States Committee of Crystallography, a huge honor. After graduating from Trinity, Kristin had to face her first tough career decision.

Now very capable and qualified in engineering, Kristin was offered a job in New York. However, she had still applied to a few graduate schools, including University of CaliforniaBerkeley, where she was accepted and offered a full scholarship to study geology. The job in New York would pay very well, but she would have to wear office clothes, while at Berkeley she would get to go on trips and study outside. Naturally, Kristin avoided “wearing nylons” all day and ultimately chose Berkeley, seeing geology as a great way of following her love for being outside and curiosity to always learn more. Geology would become one of Kristin’s passions; she now has a huge rock collection in her house, with hundreds of different minerals. At Berkeley, Kristin met one of her biggest mentors, Hans-Rudolf Wenk, a geology professor, known affectionately as “Rudy.” During her teens and early twenties, Kristin’s family dynamic was not perfect. Her mother and step-father went through a divorce in her sophomore year of high school, alongside living far away from her blood father, Kristin lacked a stable father figure in her life. Rudy became like a father for Kristin, showing her an example of a career path that she could resemble. They remain friends to this day. Rudy became Kristin’s PhD advisor, and having experience in material engineering, Rudy told Kristin about working with a Materials Science group over the Summer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the site of the creation of the first atomic bomb. Needing a job, Kristin applied without a second thought. By chance, she entered a brand new world.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a small government facility in the mesa in remote New Mexico, became Kristin’s home for her summers while at Berkeley. Los Alamos is famous for the Manhattan Project, the United States’ secret mission to build the nuclear bomb. At Los Alamos, Kristin began to bloom into the scientist she is today. In the lab, Kristin learned about the atomic bombs used in World War II and their shell atom arrangement, introducing her to crystallography. Kristin learned about Plutonium and the energy that could be harnessed from it, and she eventually began working on what Los Alamos employees considered “the dark side,” of Los Alamos, the teams working with weapons and radioactivity. Kristin’s team was tasked with dismantling old warheads, however after doing this for a while, Kristin determined that she did not want to destroy old technology. Instead, she wanted to engineer new technology, which she would become known for.

While studying at Berkeley, Kristin presented at the American Geophysical Union, and in the reception afterwards, she met a group of people interested in geophysics who planned to run together the following morning. One man she met, a geophysicist who worked in Germany, became particularly intrigued by Kristin’s skillset and personality. He spontaneously offered her a job to work as a postdoctoral fellow at GeoForschungsZentrum in Potsdam, Germany. Kristin was curious and looking for adventure, so she accepted his offer. Taking a chance, Kristin bravely ventured into highly volatile 1994 Germany, a country fresh from reunification and the fall of the Soviet Union. She entered a world where she knew no one and did not even know the language. Learning German on the plane ride over, Kristin, accompanied by her two cats, stepped into a new world surrounded by new people. Kristin again found herself improvising, but did not let her lack of a plan shake her. In Germany, Kristin performed many experiments and learned a lot about crystallography. However she felt like it was not fit for her, so after one year in Germany, Kristin returned home, again without a plan. Naturally, she returned to the place she had called home for many Summers prior, Los Alamos.

She was hired at Los Alamos as a Technical Staff Member. She specialized in neutron scattering, which is shooting neutrons at different materials to see how they react. She worked as a project manager where she and a team of scientists designed and built the High-Pressure-Preferred-Orientation Diffractometer, known as HIPPO, a one-of-a-kind instrument on the cutting edge of neutron science. This innovation put Kristin on the map in science. She then received contact from the United States Department of Energy, asking her to apply for a job working as a Program Director, working on the frontier of emerging technology in energy and nanoscience. Kristin stepped into the unknown once again, now taking an adventure into her most prominent scientific role yet.

At this point in her career, Kristin had established that she was prepared to try anything. She would jump on the opportunity to enter a new field, learn a new science, or take on a new role. Kristin seemed to simply love the excitement of stepping out of her comfort zone. Now an experienced nanoscientist, she stepped in as a Project Manager at the Department of Energy. Here, Kristin was tasked with a completely new responsibility. She handled $540 million directed toward building new Nanoscale Science Research Centers in America, which were labs funded by the government to expand research on nanotechnology and energy. Although she was already very experienced in science, Kristin was fully prepared to learn more about how science agencies and grants worked. During Kristin’s tenure, she acquired lots of experience securing federal funding for science projects, while making a huge splash in the field of emerging energy technology, which she also worked on while with the DOE. Once the Nanoscale Center project finished, Kristin looked again into the future, unsure of what adventure she would embark on next.

With her new extensive experience in business development and project management, Kristin was offered a job as a Vice President at a financial counseling and lobbying company, where she would work to help make proposals for grants to secure funding from the government. She gained invaluable experience in this job, learning how to consult, secure grants, and gain and keep clients. Although she was very successful in this job, Kristin did not want to work as a lobbyist. Lobbying government officials involves trying to sway their opinion by any means possible, and sometimes it involves dishonesty, and Kristin knew this did not sit right with her. However, through learning about what it took to succeed in this field of work, she knew she could make a big impact in business development and consulting. Kristin’s determination then fused with an idea, and soon came KB Science, founded in 2008, a firm dedicated to helping emerging scientific innovations secure grants from the government to allow for large-scale production. In Kristin’s career, she has become experienced in a vast array of sciences, including nanoscience, engineering, crystallography, physics, materials science, and energy. Through her experience, she can better understand the issues her clients face and thus can make better consulting decisions. This has made KB Science very successful, as they have brought in over $10 billion in funding for their clients. Helping these smaller scale projects gain the money necessary to expand is allowing for real cutting-edge innovation in energy, defense, engineering, etc. Although KB Science is only 16 years old, they have been enormously successful in the consulting world, but Kristin envisions bigger steps for her career in the future. With clean energy and electric vehicles on the rise in the US, the need for business plans around bringing more large-scale sustainable energy technology to the US has never been higher. KB Science is one of the companies that are on the forefront of this consulting work, helping take small-scale private companies’ technology to the national level, potentially making significant impacts.

Kristin hopes to take this opportunity of a need for businesses like hers to make real changes to help benefit the world and make it more green.

Kristin’s success in this field of work does not surprise those who work with her. One of her colleagues with KB Science is Dr. Scott Boyce, who has had a similar career in science, working in many different fields and working in consulting. He believes that Kristin’s motivation in her consulting career is due to her passion for making positive change on the world. Her fearlessness to tackle anything in her way and take on any challenge, no matter how difficult is extraordinary. “It's that passion. She has a courage that not many people have,” Dr. Boyce remarks. Kristin truly wants to and has left an outstanding mark on the world, and that is something that Dr. Boyce finds is immensely inspiring. He has worked with her for 8 years now, and he states that KB Science has been an extremely fulfilling job for him, in large part due to Kristin’s leadership. “It's very easy to get engaged with her and to feel comfortable working with her,” he says. “She's got this incredibly strong gravity.” Kristin is truly a great leader, and one of the reasons people love working with her is due to her courage to take on anything, which can be traced back to her mountaineering career, which started incidentally in college.

Kristin’s career in mountaineering started from one simple decision. In graduate school, her roommate was a marathon runner, and with Kristin being a great athlete, she naturally decided to run a marathon with her roommate. After running her first marathon, Kristin realized how much she loved to run and see different places, so she decided she would start going on running vacations. From then, every year or so Kristin would go on a one week vacation to run in different places of the world, such as Chile or India. Then, one day, she saw an advertisement for running a marathon around Mt. Kilimanjaro and then hiking Mt. Kilimanjaro afterwards. This intrigued Kristin, and before she knew it she was on the plane to Tanzania, ready to go. “That's the best thing I ever did,” Kristin remarks. After summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro, some climbing friends recommended Kristin to go to Aconcagua in Argentina, the tallest peak in South America. A year later, Kristin took off to Argentina, ready to conquer her next challenge. After reaching the summit of Aconcagua, Kristin looked toward an even bigger challenge. She went to a mountaineering school in Bolivia briefly, and soon she was a talented and experienced mountaineer. Soon after, she decided to go back to Nepal.

In 1998, during one of her vacations, Kristin visited Nepal for the first time. She climbed up to Everest base camp, and fell in love with the culture and people of Nepal. She would visit many more times, as it would become one of Kristin’s favorite places in the world. “I always feel good there. And I just kept going back,” she says. Kristin would continue to visit over and over again. In 2017, she made her first significant mark on the mountaineering world. The Nepalese government had just opened up a huge amount of untouched mountains in the Himalayas, having never been summited. Kristin jumped on this opportunity and with a group of climbers set off to accomplish an “original ascent” of Tharke Khang, a 22-thousand foot peak in the Himalayas. In icy and freezing conditions, Kristin and her team summited the mountain, becoming the first people to ever reach its summit. However, Kristin developed severe frostbite on her right finger, eventually having some of it removed. Nonetheless, Kristin cherished it as a life-changing experience. Then in 2018, she would go back to achieve another original ascent, this time on Nupla Khang, another 22-thousand footer. After another highly technical climb in tough conditions, Kristin and her team reached the summit. Kristin’s “original ascents” reflect her outlook on life. Just like in her ascent, she has carved her own path through life. The trajectory of her career has been unprecedented. Her vast collection of adventures and experiences are unparalleled in her field. Although so much of her life has been blazing forward and adventuring, Kristin has continuously worked to give back to her communities.

When Kristin first traveled to Nepal, she realized how many Nepalese girls were uneducated and underprivileged, unable to follow their passions and try new things like Kristin could in her own childhood, so she decided to step in and help. She became a volunteer with

Tsering’s Fund, which is a nonprofit organization that helps Nepalese girls pay for education. Kristin sponsors a 13 year old girl whom she contacts often to check on. Tsering’s Fund is truly a game changer, as rural Nepalese girls usually do not have the chance to be educated and many fall victim to sex trafficking. Through this fund, they can go to school and learn trades to help their village. Kristin has been involved with Tsering’s Fund for over a decade. “It’s a really important organization to me,” she says, “I have a picture of the girl I sponsor on my wall.”

Kristin’s donation helps fund the young woman’s education, a privilege most rural Nepalese girls do not have. Kristin also helped found the non-profit Anything is Possible, which helps young Sherpa girls learn to mountaineer. Due to the impact that the country and culture of Nepal has had on Kristin’s life, she feels it is her duty to give back and help the youth of the country. Throughout her career, Kristin has been involved in community service and giving back to underprivileged people. While she was in college, she would volunteer in science outreach programs, getting young school children interested in science. Having experienced the disproportionate amount of women involved in science firsthand, Kristin has worked toward helping young girls get more involved in science. “I think that showing people like by mentoring, and working in programs that promote women in science, or promote STEM, to show them, here's an example. I'm a scientist, even though I might not look like most of the men,” Kristin says.

The next time Kristin went back to Nepal was in 2021, again with Kristin Harila alongside the rest of her team, including Kristin’s friend Ringi Sherpa, and Nepalese climber, to climb Mount Everest. After long weeks of preparation and climbing, Kristin reached the top of the world on May 23rd, 2021, an incredible achievement. While on the way, her team achieved the Guiness World Record for the highest altitude tea party ever, at an astounding 21,000 feet. Although most might decide to slow down and take some time off after such a feat, Kristin hit the ground running, going back to work with KB Science and returning to Asia again just a year later to summit K2 and Nanga Parbat.

Kristin always has had an adventurous and competitive spirit. Before she climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, she remembered how her mentor, Rudy Wenk, had also climbed it and had bragged about it, so naturally she wanted to climb it as well, because Kristin truly believes she is as strong as anyone. When Kristin first heard about the two other American women who summited K2, she immediately knew she was just as strong as them and she too could summit K2. “I knew I was stronger. You know how competitive I am. I wasn't afraid,” Kristin says. K2 is considered the most brutal climb imaginable on Earth, so naturally Kristin jumped on the opportunity to reach this peak. After a grueling trek up the mountain in extreme cold and wind, Kristin summited K2. ”For me, I was really proud of myself. It was very personal. Because like most of the climbing I did by myself, I wasn't afraid. And you're so focused. When I look back at the pictures, and I think about what I did, I feel sick,” Kristin says. Although Everest was such an achievement, Kristin considers her summit of K2 her best mountaineering conquest. Later on in 2022, Kristin would venture to Antarctica to reach another one of the Seven Summits, the highest peaks of each continent in the world. She climbed Vinson Massif, a 16,000 foot peak in remote Antarctica. Both her mountaineering and science career have been fueled by her desire to compete and to succeed, as her adventurous spirit pushes her to achieve more and more, leaving her mark on the world.

Nowadays, Kristin lives in Cambridge, MA with her two cats, Choey and Tabby, named after two twin mountains in the Himalayas Cholatse and Taboche. She continues to lead KB Science while also serving on the US National Committee for Crystallography and The Board on International Scientific Organizations of the National Academies. Her appointment to these two groups is a great honor, as Kristin is considered one of the most experienced and respected scientists in America. She continues to lead Anything is Possible and volunteer with Tsering’s Fund, while still adventuring around the world. Kristin believes that you can never stop learning, no matter how successful you are. Whenever she encounters something she does not know, she jumps on an opportunity to learn more.

Kristin has always had an intrinsic, almost clairvoyant, internal compass. Fueled by her curiosity, desire for knowledge, and readiness for anything, Kristin seems to always make the right decision. At many points, she has been faced with tough decisions, which for most would require serious consideration, while for Kristin, whichever choice allowed her to do what she loved and keep learning was the right way to go. Kristin lives by the idea that “you can’t fall out of the universe.” Kristin says that if you want to learn something new, there is no wrong decision or wrong direction. “There’s really no risk,” she says, “I have no regrets.” Kristin’s career could be considered an original ascent of life, just as she has done on mountains in the Himalayas. Her path through all branches of science, owning her own company, the K2 bottleneck, and the top of the world itself demonstrates how Kristin values doing what she loves and following her heart. She was never motivated by money, fame, or glory, but rather a true love for life and everything it has to offer, as at every turn she trusted her heart to guide her in the right direction.