Kristin Medlin, MPA, MS
Get to Know Us
Kristin Medlin is the co-founder and Director of Research and Development for Collaboratory, an engagement-tracking platform she co-invented alongside Drs. Emily Janke and Barbara Holland while serving as a graduate student, and then as an assistant director in UNCG’s Institute for Community and Economic Engagement. She left UNCG in 2015 to support and ultimately lead Collaboratory as it was licensed by external vendors. Collaboratory is now used by over 60 campuses nationwide, including the entire Indiana University System, UCLA, Princeton University, Arizona State University, NC State, and UNCG. Collaboratory helps higher education institutions document, understand, and strengthen their community-based work. Under her leadership, Collaboratory has grown from a UNCG/campus-built innovation into a national infrastructure used by colleges and universities to manage partnership data, support strategic planning, and make the public purpose of higher education more visible and actionable. In recognition of this work, Collaboratory received the 2025 Impact Innovation Award from the Center for Advancing Research Impact in Society (ARIS).
Kristin’s work sits at the intersection of strategy, institutional effectiveness, and field-building. She partners with national associations to develop shared standards and advance applied learning across the sector. Her recent initiatives include developing a national research fellowship with the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU), leading a national community of practice with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), and serving as a national training partner for the Carnegie Foundation’s Elective Community Engagement Classification. She completed the Executive Course in Data Stewardship through The GovLab and the Open Data Policy Lab, strengthening her expertise in data governance and public-interest technology.
As a scholar-practitioner, Kristin’s career has focused on strengthening the systems and data infrastructures required to sustain high-impact community engagement. Early in her professional journey, she was selected as a national PAGE Fellow with Imagining America (2012), reflecting a longstanding commitment to advancing publicly engaged scholarship. Her current work examines how artificial intelligence can bring greater precision, transparency, and coherence to the way institutions define, classify, and assess community-engaged work. She also leads the Collaboratory research dataset, which is the largest national dataset on community-campus partnerships and supports institutional benchmarking and sector-wide analysis. She is an alumna of UNCG, holding graduate degrees in Educational Research, Assessment, and Evaluation, as well as Public Administration. She currently serves as a Visiting Senior Scholar in the Institute for Community & Economic Engagement at UNCG supporting scholarship. In 2026, she was awarded the Community Engagement Excellence Award given by the Institute for Community and Economic Engagement and the Division of Research and Engagement.
A dedicated leader in the Greensboro community, Kristin is a graduate of Leadership Greensboro (Class of 2014) and has served as Board Secretary for the YWCA Greensboro, on the Young Leaders Cabinet for the United Way of Greater Greensboro, and on United Way’s Education and Income Impact Committee (2014–2022). She remains active in her church community and her children’s elementary school PTA. Outside of her professional and civic work, Kristin is a proud wife and mother of three (ages 3, 6, and 9) and enjoys gardening and riding motorcycles.