In December 2021 Isabel Steinhardt changed to the University of Paderborn as a professor of education sociology.

From January 2018 to December 2021  Isabel held a position as assistant professor at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Kassel, Chair for University Research of Professor Georg Krücken. Isabel Steinhardt has joined INCHER as a researcher in December 2013. She was active in the research project ‘External and Internal Quality Assurance/Management of Teaching and Learning through Accreditation and Evaluation Processes’ for which she was among the group who applied for the external funding. Isabel has studied political science at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and obtained her doctorate in sociology with the thesis "Program Development as a Strategic Moment of professors". Her main foci are organizational and university research, theories of action, grounded theory and qualitative research methods.

She has been involved in various research projects, such as "Promotion of Part-Time Study" or "Social Scientific Evaluation in the Electromobility Model Region Rhein-Main". She was employed in various positions at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, for example, as a consultant for quality assurance.

Isabel Steinhardt joined the Competence Center for Empirical Research Methods in 2015 as a member. She advises students of all disciplines to qualitative research methods. From this activity the blog "Sozialwissenschaftliche Methodenberatung" was developed in order to make the individual questions and answers given in the discussions accessible to all.