Kate Quinn is project director for Balance@UW, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded initiative to increase the flexibility of UW faculty careers. She is the recipient of the 2008 Society of Women Engineers Work Life Balance Award, which "celebrates an individual who has worked to create programs that help women engineers and other employees balance the commitments of career, life and family."
Her current research focuses on the ways in which higher education policy, climate/culture, and leadership interact to structure work/life balance for faculty and students. In particular, her work explores strategies for developing department chairs into leaders who can transform the climate and culture of their departments to be supportive of faculty with care-giving responsibilities. She received her Ph.D. and M.Ed. in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from the University of Washington and her B.A. in English from the State University of New York at Geneseo.

Dr. Quinn has presented research findings and policy recommendations nationally and is published in Academe and Change. Additionally, she has articles forthcoming in the Journal of the Professoriate, the Journal about Women in Higher Education, and the Department Chair, as well as a book chapter coming out about the UW's efforts to create work-life flexibility for faculty, staff, and students. A nationally recognized expert in the field of work-life flexibility in higher education, she receives numerous invitations to participate in national meetings and to present at conferences.

Quinn is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), and the College and University Work/Family Association (CUWFA). At the University of Washington, she is a member of the President's Advisory Committee on Women (PACW) and a guest consultant of the Faculty Council on Women in Academia.

She resides in Seattle with her husband, a graduate student in the History department at the University of Washington. In April/May 2007, they went to Greece and Sicily on a research trip. Highlights of the travel log are here.

On 10/4/07, they adopted Cassie, a year-old labrador retriever mix.