Upon receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, Grinter worked at Bell Labs in Naperville, Illinois as a Technical Staff Member from 1996 to 2000. She then left Bell Labs to accept a position as a Research Staff Member at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) from 2000 to 2004. At PARC, Grinter supervised a study of iTunes use in the workplace whose results were reported in The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other major news outlets. One of the study's contributions was to show that "playlist anxiety" occurs in the workplace and not only in collegiate settings. In 2004, Grinter transitioned from industrial to academic research and joined the faculty of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech as an associate professor. At Georgia Tech, she founded and currently directs the Work2Play Lab in the GVU Center. In 2006, Grinter served as the Research Papers Co-chair for CHI, the most prestigious academic conference in the field of HCI. Her research and expert opinion on technology have been reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, MSNBC, and CNN.
