Biography

Cate is the Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at edX, a non-profit mission-driven education organization founded by MIT and Harvard in 2012. Cate is responsible for growing edX on a global scale by forming strategic partnerships between edX and all sorts of different organizations across the world - universities, foundations, non-profit consortia, research thinktanks, national governments, NGOs, and so on. Before joining edX, Cate served as Harvard University's Chief Strategy Officer across the entire University, as well as the Executive Director of the university-wide Business + Academic Technology Transformation Program. In both these capacities, Cate was responsible for leading the strategic planning + execution efforts of the new technology service delivery arm, including the transformation; managing the overall progress for key University priorities through leading management strategies, best practices, and processes; managing all high priority University-wide initiatives enabled by technology as a portfolio/(s); and managing key University governance processes related to strategic planning and executive-level decisionmaking for the University's high-priority investments enabled by technology. Prior to joining Harvard in 2010, Cate served her public sector + non-profit clients as a management consultant in Deloitte Consulting's Strategy & Operations practice where she was nominated by U.S. firm leadership to serve on the CEO's 2010 Management Advisory Council, an honor reserved for the top <1% of senior management leadership ranks across the U.S. Cate was also individually recognized on multiple occasions for excellence in management consulting and client service delivery, for team building and mentorship initiatives with management and staff, and her community service leadership on behalf of the firm. Cate has focused on the public and not-for-profit sectors, including higher education, throughout her entire career. As a top-performing member in the senior management and industry leadership ranks at Deloitte Consulting, Cate focused on complex enterprise-wide business transformations, and directly advised and supported executive-level leaders throughout the full lifecycle of large-scale transformation efforts beginning typically with current state assessments and strategic planning, then continuing on with prioritized and detailed operational improvements in core business areas such as finance as well as key service delivery areas often involving enabling IT solution selections and implementations, the full project and program management thereof, and then ending with post-program analyses to assess and communicate continuous improvement opportunities, lessons learned, and actual benefits realized (both quantitative and qualitative). Prior to Deloitte, Cate focused on health care and welfare reform policy research at both Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Cate received her B.A. in Political Science from Wellesley College and her M.P.P. with distinction from the University of Chicago, where she was also awarded the Levin Fellowship "for scholars with exemplary academic and extracurricular records."