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Krista L. Newkirk spent her formative years on a cattle ranch in Missouri before attending the University of Missouri’s Honor College on scholarship. After two years there, she transferred to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she graduated one year later in the top five percent of her class with a Bachelor of Arts in English and a minor in Philosophy. She went on to earn her Juris Doctor degree from the Marshall-Wythe School of Law at the College of William & Mary.

While in law school, Krista served as editor-in-chief of the William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law and as a teaching assistant. She received the Marshall-Wythe Gambrell Professionalism Award and was selected as the Outstanding Woman Law Graduate by the National Association of Women Lawyers. During her time in law school, Krista also served as an intern at the Newport News Commonwealth Attorney’s Office, where she worked with victims and witnesses, negotiated outcomes for the Domestic Violence Unit, and prosecuted cases, including felonies. She worked for several years as an attorney in both private practice and at a Fortune 300 company.

Krista joined the Office of Legal Affairs at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2003. In that role, she provided legal advice to the Chancellor, the Board of Trustees, and faculty and staff on a wide range of legal topics, as well as managing complex litigation. During this time, Krista was selected by her peers as a Legal Elite in the corporate counsel category by Business North Carolina in 2010, was a graduate of Leadership North Carolina’s Class XIX in 2012, and served on a number of boards, including as Chair of the Education Section of the North Carolina Bar Association, the Institute for Social Capital which she helped to establish, and the Women + Girls Research Alliance.