My throughline…

My professional life began as a career counselor, where I learned to listen carefully, ask good questions, and help people reframe challenges in ways that open new possibilities. When I was tapped to lead my first program evaluation, I recognized that those same skills could help organizations understand whether their work was making a difference — and how to make it better.

And so my throughline began.

Over thirty years, I've worked across sectors to build the infrastructure that connects strategy to evidence to learning. In higher education, I designed effectiveness and improvement frameworks. In community philanthropy, I led strategic learning and helped grantees strengthen their own evaluation capacity. In between and alongside, I've conducted rigorous evaluations focused on organizational transformation, workforce development, student success, and systems change. Through all of it: the conviction that strategy, evidence, and learning are a continuous cycle — not a reporting obligation, but the engine of lasting impact.

In 2026, I founded Throughline Advisory around that conviction. Mission-driven organizations deserve a partner who brings both rigor and relationship to the work: facilitating honest conversation, building trust, and helping organizations not just collect data, but actually use what they learn — turning data into decisions, and decisions into the change they're trying to achieve.

When I'm not doing that work, you'll probably find me on the ice. I've been a curler for nine years, and it's taught me more than I could have imagined about reading conditions, adjusting strategy in real time, and what you can achieve when you work as a team — principles that turn out to be just as relevant in organizational life as they are in the rink.

A woman with shoulder-length dark hair wearing a black top, smiling, in a well-lit indoor setting with a blurred background.

Kathleen earned a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Leadership from the University of Maryland, where her research examined boundary spanning in leadership teams - a framework that continues to shape how she thinks about systems, data, and decision-making. Her work has appeared in New Directions for Evaluation, New Directions for Institutional Research, the AEA365 blog, and several peer-reviewed volumes on assessment and learning in higher education. She serves as an Academy Mentor with the Higher Learning Commission's Assessment Academy, coaching college teams through learning assessment and institutional improvement, and regularly presents at the American Evaluation Association's national conference. She is a member of the American Evaluation Association and the Ohio Program Evaluators' Group.