Katharine Celentano
Board Secretary, Columbia University
Katharine Celentano is currently an undergraduate at Columbia University where she studies Neuroscience and Behavior and Economics.
Katharine’s experience within the recovery community, including spending two years as a client of a residential psychiatric treatment facility, motivates her work towards a world where illness is not treated with handcuffs. Having lost several friends to overdose and seeing the criminalization of addiction otherwise injure those working to heal themselves convinced her that the correct question is not whether or not legalization is compatible with recovery, but whether or not prohibition is compatible with recovery.
Previously President of her school’s SSDP chapter, she is a recipient of the 2012 Columbia University School of General Studies Spirit Award. She played a key role in the passage of Columbia’s new Good Samaritan Policy and served as College Coordinator at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a Research Assistant at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, a volunteer at The Washington Heights CORNER Project, a Manhattan syringe exchange and harm reduction facility, and has also worked in retail pharmacy.
In her free time, Katharine enjoys fitness, the outdoors, dancing goofy while sober, film, hearing others’ stories, and friends and family.
