Biography

Kathy Quick is an academic co-director of the university-wide Center for Integrative Leadership and former chair of the Humphrey School’s management and leadership area.

Dr. Quick’s focus is bringing together people with diverse perspectives to work on high-stakes, complex, and often contentious public policy problems. Since 2016, she has centered her work on how different people define and experience public safety. Her research has included collaborating with tribal governments on roadway safety in reservations, partnering with government and nonprofit organizations to problematize and try to improve community relationships with police and other first responders, coediting a special issue of Public Management Review on what public management can learn from studies of policing, and co-founding an international study group on policing.

Dr. Quick utilizes ethnographic methods to identify practices and processes that improve or impede equity and inclusion. By studying practitioners  doing their work, she gleans insights to share with graduate students and community partners working to build their civic engagement skills and strengthen democracy. She also continually hones her own craft by practicing what she studies and teaches, for example by facilitating the Falcon Heights Task Force on Policing and Inclusion and cochairing the University of Minnesota's MSafe Committee on campus policing.

Originally from rural Pennsylvania, Dr. Quick worked as an environmental advocate and policy analyst in Indonesia for eight years and as a community development manager for two California cities for six years. She holds a Ph.D. in Planning, Policy, and Design from the University of California, Irvine, which recognized Dr. Quick as one of their top 50 graduate student alumni from the first fifty years of the university.

Education

PhD in Planning, Policy, and Design (University of California, Irvine, 2010)

MCP in City Planning (University of California, Berkeley, 2002)

BS in Biology (Swarthmore College, 1991)