Pitt alumna Katy Nesbitt is again a World Cup referee

Pitt alumna Katy Nesbitt (A&S '15G) will return to the FIFA World Cup pitch this summer as an assistant referee for the 2026 edition, hosted in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

"Breaking into the professional international level is incredibly hard," Nesbitt told Pitt Magazine in 2022. "Staying there is just as hard."

But Nesbitt has done just that, and at the sport's highest global levels. She became the first American woman to ever officiate a men's World Cup match in 2022 and is now a part the 2026 event's only all-woman referee trio, alongside U.S. Soccer's Tori Penso and Brooke Mayo.

Nesbitt, Pitt's 2023 undergraduate commencement speaker, earned her bachelor's degree from St. John Fisher College (now St. John Fisher University) in her hometown of Rochester, New York. In 2015, she received her PhD in chemistry from Pitt's Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences before becoming a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan.

"In science, it often doesn't work out when you're studying something - trying to discover something new or have a new hypothesis," Nesbitt shared in 2023. "Refereeing is also not the easiest job. You're often hated by half the fans and not well-liked by some of the players, so finding a way to work through these struggles and bounce back is a skill that works well in both fields."

Nesbitt began officiating full-time in 2019, leaving a career in analytical chemistry and as an assistant professor at Towson University in Baltimore to do so.

Since then, on top of assignments at both the men's and women's World Cups, she became the first woman to referee a championship match in professional men's sports in North America at the 2020 MLS Cup and was the first woman to be named MLS Assistant Referee of the Year. U.S. Soccer also named Nesbitt its inaugural Female Referee of the Year in 2024. Her high-profile assignments that year included working the women's Olympic soccer tournament in France.