​Michael J. Quinn lives in Seattle, Washington, and serves as dean of the College of Science and Engineering and director of the Initiative in Ethics and Transformative Technologies at Seattle University. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees at Eastside Catholic School in Sammamish, Washington.

Michael Quinn is a native Oregonian. When he was very young his family moved to the Rockwood neighborhood east of Portland. After graduating from Gresham High School, he earned a B.S. in mathematics from Gonzaga University and an M.S. in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He worked for two years as a software engineer at Tektronix, Inc., in Wilsonville and Beaverton, Oregon, then returned to graduate school to complete a Ph.D. in computer science from Washington State University.

For a total of 24 years Dr. Quinn was a computer science professor at the University of New Hampshire and Oregon State University. He did pioneering research in the field of parallel computing, and his textbooks on that subject have been used by hundreds of universities worldwide. In the early 2000s his focus shifted to computer ethics, and in 2004 he published a textbook, Ethics for the Information Age, that explores moral problems related to modern uses of information technology, such as privacy, intellectual property rights, computer security, software reliability, and the relationship between automation and unemployment. The book, now in its eighth edition, has been adopted by more than 125 colleges and universities in the United States and many more internationally.