Dr Lissa V. Young

Lissa Young is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York where she teaches in the Management program. 

Lissa Young is a 1986 graduate of the United States Military Academy, and a former Army aviator. She flew CH-47D “Chinook” cargo helicopters. During her Army career Lissa served at West Point on the faculty of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, and was the course director for PL300, the Academy’s core course in Leadership, from 1996-1999. 

After graduating from the Army’s Command and General staff College in 2000, Lissa was selected to take command of the U.S. Army’s only High-Altitude Search and Rescue Chinook unit and was stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska. While there, Lissa led the effort to exhume a 90-million-year-old Ichthyosaur fossil from the rocky faces of the Brooks Range north of the Arctic Circle. This highly coveted specimen had been monitored for nearly thirty years by the archeological scholars of the University of Alaska. Lissa, seeing the opportunity to put her military helicopters and crews in the service of good, designed an extraction mission under the auspices of “Army Training”. Also, while serving in that command, she deployed to and flew counterdrug operations for the government of Thailand along the Myanmar border.

In the summer of 2002, Lissa was selected for promotion to Lieutenant Colonel, and chosen by the United States Military Academy to join its faculty as a permanent Academy Professor. Later that summer, Lissa was involuntarily discharged from the military, under the auspices of the now defunct Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. After picking up the pieces and transitioning to the civilian sector, Lissa served as Raytheon Company’s lead sales representative for air traffic control systems in the Middle East from 2003 to 2007. 

In 2007, Lissa was awarded a Presidential Fellowship by Harvard University, and in 2013 earned her doctorate there. Her research examines the effects of stereotyping and prejudice on interpersonal assessments of competence in high performance teams, and how war has influenced the development and direction of the discipline of Social Psychology. Lissa holds a Bachelor of Science in Literature from the United States Military Academy (1986), a Master of Arts degree in Social Psychology from the University of Kansas (1996), a Master of Education degree from Harvard University (2009), and a Doctorate in Education Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice (EPLIP) from Harvard University (2013). Lissa also earned and was awarded a doctoral certificate from Harvard University’s Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (2013).