Kate Smith is Senior Conservator of Paintings and head of the paintings lab at the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums. She is a 2001 graduate of the SUNY Buffalo State University art conservation graduate program and has previously worked at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Kate studies and preserves the Harvard painting collection from ancient to modern works with a particular focus on using technical imaging to investigate artists’ materials and techniques. She co-teaches conservation-focused undergraduate and graduate courses at Harvard with her conservation department colleagues including The Making of Art and Artifacts: History, Material and Technique, Science and the Practice of Art History, and the Summer Institute for the Technical Study of Art (SITSA).