Colleen is currently Senior Scientist at Unilever Home and Personal Care, where she started in 2003 immediately after receiving her PhD at Northwestern working in the group of Professor Harold Kung. She located this position through a network of Northwestern PhD graduates working at Unilever in the Chicago area. Colleen received her BS degree in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.

Colleen's work is focused primarily on hair care product development. So far, she has only worked on the initial stage of product development, which involves the investigation of new technologies to produce the desired effect on hair, along with optimization of the product formula. She works closely with the analytical department to understand how the technologies work and to correlate certain properties of the products with consumer responses. Eventually, once a product is optimized, her work will shift to focus on scale-up of the manufacturing process. Colleen's current area of concentration is completely different from the work she did as a graduate student, where she focused on heterogeneous catalysis. However, many of the analytical techniques used at Unilever are the same as those she used at Northwestern, which makes it easy to know what analytical tests should be conducted on a product to obtain the necessary information and how to interpret the resulting data. Also, the general approach to developing a research strategy and the necessary critical thinking for evaluation of her own work or the work of her colleagues that she acquired in graduate school are applied constantly in her position.

Colleen values her educational experience at Northwestern. In particular, there were two programs at Northwestern that were unique compared to those available to her colleagues who received PhD degrees from other top-tier departments. One is the Center for Catalysis and Surface Science, which offered direct contact with representatives from industry, as well as kept everyone involved updated on what various research groups within the university were studying. In her research, contact with Center members from industry was extremely valuable, as they were able to help with some indispensable analytical techniques that she would not have used otherwise. Secondly, Colleen took advantage of the Teaching Apprenticeship Program to help develop her career interests.