As a world-leading expert on engineering doctoral attrition and persistence, Catherine Berdanier not only conducts incredible research, she also implements it into practice. She is the first to specifically investigate longitudinal mechanisms for doctoral attrition in engineering, characterizing dynamic factors by which engineering students leave their PhD, often earning a master's degree as an "off ramp." "My research over the past ten years has shown that most attrition is not due to technical incompetence or not being 'smart enough,' but due to social and psychological wellness issues. If our best minds are driven away from the PhD, we lose future research ideas and solutions as innovators, research professors, and educators of future generations. The hardest part of a PhD should be pushing on the boundaries of science," she said. She aims to expand new theories and methods to transform traditional engineering departmental policies to reimagine doctoral education and mentorship for a thriving PhD-holding workforce.

Since 2016, she has held faculty positions at Pennsylvania State University including a three-year named professorship. She has been funded through 10 PI/co-PI grants, including an NSF CAREER grant. Recently she was awarded a PECASE award, the highest honor bestowed on an early-career researcher by the federal government. Overall, she has topped $5.4 million in funding. Berdanier has presented her research-based findings through workshops and invited talks across four countries and three continents, reaching thousands of graduate students and professors. She has published over 40 journals and over 100 peer-reviewed conference publications, most with student authorship, and in 2020, she published a textbook on engineering writing. She has also been the director of the Penn State World Campus Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering program since 2016, where she designs student-centric experiences to enable graduate student thriving.

Her students' victories are evidence of her mentoring strengths. She has mentored her graduate students to be the recipients of several national awards: She has had four NSF GRFP winners, a NASA Space Grant Consortium awardee, two Sloan Research Fellows, a National Academies Mirzayan fellowship recipient, and an ASEE e-Fellows Postdoctoral Fellow, among others.