Prior to her appointment as Dean, she served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Intellectual Life. She is a Professor of Law at Albany Law School and a Professor of Bioethics in the Union Graduate College/Mt. Sinai School of Medicine Program in Bioethics. Her research focuses on health law, disability rights, family law, children’s rights, and human reproduction. Her book, Bioethics and Disability: Toward a Disability Conscious Bioethics, was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press. She has authored numerous articles published in academic journals such as the American Journal of Law and Medicine, the Hastings Center Report, the American Journal of Bioethics, the Hastings Law Journal, the Indiana Law Journal and Oregon Law Review. She is also a co-editor of the definitive Cambridge Dictionary of Bioethics (forthcoming) (co-edited with Laurence McCullough and Robert Baker).

Before joining the law faculty, Dean Ouellette served as an Assistant Solicitor General in the New York State-Attorney General’s office. As ASG, Prof. Ouellette briefed and argued more than 100 appeals on issues ranging from termination of treatment for the terminally ill to the responsibility of gun manufacturers for injuries caused by handguns. Before that, Dean Ouellette worked in private practice and served as a confidential law clerk to Judge Howard A. Levine on the New York State Court of Appeals. She has continued her advocacy work in select cases and was lead counsel on the law professors' brief submitted in support of same-sex couples who sought the right to marry in New York state.