As the Director of the Astrophysics Division, in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Dr. Kinney manages over thirty flight projects including such missions as Spitzer Space Telescope, Chandra, Hubble, as well as future missions like JWST and LISA. Originally from Wisconsin, Dr. Kinney received her bachelor's degree in 1975. She studied for several years at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, and received her doctorate in Physics from New York University in 1984. Dr. Kinney has served on the Council of the American Astronomical Society, and has been a visiting scholar at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. An expert in extragalactic astronomy, Dr. Kinney has worked on characterizing the optical and UV spectra of quasars, blazars, active and normal galaxies. She has also studied active galaxies accretion disk signatures.