Catherine Hogan was born in Cork, Ireland in 1974, and educated at University College Cork (BSc in Biochemistry) and Trinity College Dublin (MRes). In 1998, Catherine joined Gareth Jones' lab at the Randall Institute, London to study the biology of cell migration. Her PhD (in collaboration with Anne Ridley and Graham Dunn) was focused on understanding Rho GTPase signalling to the actin cytoskeleton during macrophage chemotaxis.

Catherine joined the lab of Yasuyuki Fujita, at the Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology (LMCB) at University College London in 2003 and led on a number of successful projects, including identifying regulatory mechanisms of E-cadherin-based cell-cell adhesion and describing oncogene-induced cell competition in mammalian epithelial tissues. In 2013, she joined the European Cancer Stem Cell Research Institute at Cardiff University as Research Fellow. She was awarded tenure at Cardiff University in 2020 and is currently Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences. Her research lab is focused on understanding the molecular cell biology underlying early tumourigenesis in epithelial tissues.