Dr. Beattie has been passionate about fungi since her undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University where she studied meiotic recombination in bakers yeast. She continued studying mycology in graduate school in Dr. Robert Cramer's lab at Dartmouth. Her studies on A. fumigatus pathogenesis in the lungs focused on central carbon metabolism and the role of carbon catabolite repression in virulence. Taking her love of filamentous fungi to a yeast lab, she then joined the team of Dr. Damian Krysan at the University of Iowa to pursue high throughput anti-fungal drug screening. Here, she developed a high throughput screening assay, removing the 'middleman' of anti-mold drug discovery by skipping the yeast and screening directly with A. fumigatus, becoming one of very few investigators in the world to take this approach. 

In addition to drug development, Dr. Beattie's research also focuses on the pathogenesis of A. fumigatus in the brain, infections known as cerebral aspergillosis. These infections are poorly understood but remain major contributors to morbidity and mortality of invasive aspergillosis. These studies, combined with a high throughput screen of CNS-penetrant drugs, aim to both understand the factors that allow dissemination to the brain and identification of novel compounds to treat cerebral aspergillosis.

In her free time Dr. Beattie is a gold smith and makes handmade jewelry in her home studio. She has two sweet orange cats who love to watch her tend to the garden.