Lisa Gates, Ph.D.
Dr. Lisa Gates (she/her/hers) is a published author in the fields of Communication and Leadership and is a passionate, award-winning educator. With three decades in the college classroom and years of consulting and executive coaching experience, she is a student-centered equity-minded educator who supports students so they can more fully realize their own and others’ human potential, attain the careers and lives they envision, and lead others meaningfully, equitably, and ethically. She teaches leadership to master’s students and undergraduates at San Diego State University and serves as the Director and Advisor for the MA in Postsecondary Educational Leadership with a Specialization in Student Affairs and the SDSU Leadership Minor.
She holds an Associate of Arts degree from Cypress College, a Bachelor and Master of Arts in Communication from San Diego State University, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Communication, with an emphasis in critical organizational/gender studies from the University of Southern California, where her dissertation was considered for the International Communication Association’s Dissertation of the Year Award. Dr. Gates’s research addresses organizational power, health, and gender communication, educational leadership, integrative inquiry, strategies that address students’ full participation in their education, and qualitative/narrative methodologies.
Dr. Gates is a radically compassionate, equity-minded educator both in and out of the classroom who embodies a deep, abiding fidelity to her students. She has demonstrated deep integrity in her commitment to student success over the course of her career -- evidenced by not only numerous awards for outstanding instruction and advising but through the successes of her students—even long after they graduate. She treats students like family -- and that means doing what's needed to demonstrate love and compassion and also, to challenge them and to help them pivot when necessary. She sees teaching as a communicative act constituted by thoughtful consideration of the actual students who are in the spaces where she leads. She is aware that how she sees students may impact the way they see themselves and she sees them in light of their vast and sometimes unrealized brilliance. It is her life’s purpose to bring that awareness to light.
Dr. Gates’s heart, her everyday encounters, her pedagogy, and her scholarship have always been about identifying how people found at the margins of systems and structures can enact their agency for positive change and to recreate systems in more equitable, compassionate, and loving ways. She is an ethnographer--a narrative scholar and uses this in her pedagogy, campus presentations, and research to help others understand what it is like to experience the world from another’s point of view. There are so many stories to tell to foster empathy, compassion, and love within higher education and she works to tell those stories.
She also has experience as an administrator in higher education as a department Chair, overseeing graduate and undergraduate academic programs, and in student affairs. This balanced perspective offers her a broad view of the realities of higher education.
