Dr. Kathy Quick is chair of the Humphrey School’s management and leadership area and academic co-director of the university-wide Center for Integrative Leadership. Dr. Quick’s focus is bringing together people with diverse perspectives to work on high-stakes, complex, and often contentious public policy problems. Trained in public management and urban planning, she works in a variety of policy content areas, the common thread being identifying practices and processes that improve equity and inclusion. Dr. Quick researches effective approaches by studying professionals doing their work and shares the lessons learned with graduate students to strengthen their civic engagement skills. She also continually hones her own craft by practicing what she studies and teaches.
Her transportation-related scholarship and public service includes: extensive work with tribal governments in Minnesota and nationally on improving roadway safety in reservations; several case studies and community service to improve equity and safety in police-constituent interactions on roads; a case study of the construction of a coalition of bicyclists with diverse and originally conflicting interests; a stakeholder identification and engagement tool for roadway safety professionals; analyses of public communication gaps regarding the challenges and priorities for sustaining local road systems in Minnesota; and a practitioner-informed review of best practices for social media use in transportation planning and implementation.
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 in California for six years. Dr. Quick holds a PhD in planning, policy, and design from the University of California, Irvine, which recognized her as one of their top 50 graduate student alumni from the first fifty years of the university.