In Profile: Ester Quinn

When he turned forty almost twenty years ago, Ester Quinn’s husband experienced what she calls “male menopause.”

“He needed to buy a Harley Davidson,” she says in her office on the sixteenth floor of the Presbyterian Building. “And all these years later, we’ve seen parts of the country we never would have if it weren’t for that motorcycle.”

Quinn, currently director of human resources and faculty affairs for the Ob/Gyn department, has worked here for more than thirty years. That’s long enough to remember the installation of the first MRI in the radiology department; to remember watching a CAT scan machine being hoisted by crane into the Vanderbilt clinic; to recall a time when coworkers were out of work for six weeks for routine gall bladder surgery.

“Now a gall bladder surgery has people out for something like six days,” she says. “And I’ve been here to witness it all.”

Quinn’s professional attire doesn’t fit the stereotype of someone who’s traveled thousands of miles cross country on the back of a Harley. But the 2010 holiday card she pulls from a filing cabinet shows her and her husband standing not beside the silver tinsel of a Christmas tree, but beside a gleaming motorcycle.

“The whole biker outlaw image is really just something of a bygone era,” Quinn says. “It’s not prevalent in the motorcycle riders you see now. People are surprised to hear that the median age is 50 years old.”

From Route 66 to Daytona Beach—“It’s all about the freedom, the freedom to get up and move”—Quinn and her husband meticulously plan their trips to see as much of the country as they can.

“It’s a big hobby as opposed to a little hobby,” she says. “When you get home from a trip you’re exhausted. You think, ‘Could we have done that in a car? Yes. Would it have been as exciting? Absolutely not.’”

One reason Quinn was open to her husband’s “big hobby” in the first place is that she has been a passionate traveler “forever.” Every Martin Luther King Day weekend, for years, she and a group of friends have toured a different European city.

“I think now about all the people who have said to me, ‘That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of—going to Rome for a four-day weekend.’ Well, here I am and I’ve been to fifteen major cities throughout Europe. And I have great memories,” Quinn says. She adds that four days is enough time to see everything you want if you plan the trip in advance and plan well.

“What I say to people all the time is that life is short. You have to get up and do things when you can—because nothing’s ever promised for tomorrow.”

Yet no matter how far she travels, year after year, Quinn always comes back to Columbia University Medical Center, where, she says, she has a personal relationship with the institution, where she is also a patient, and where she is surrounded by “so many levels of employees who make everything tick together.”

“There are many occasions when you see the entry-level employee talking to the Nobel Prize winner, and I am in awe of that. Everyone here is working toward the same goal. And it’s a great place to work for that reason.”

Quinn’s coworkers say they are grateful to work with someone so enthusiastic about her job.

“Ester represents the best of what a Columbia employee is all about,” says Mary E. D’Alton, professor and chair of obstetrics and gynecology. “Our department has been so very privileged to have her wisdom, work ethic, and good humor for more than 24 years. She is passionate, hard working, and dedicated to making Columbia a better place for everyone she works with—a true ‘Leader of the Pack.’”