by Amy Waltner
Dr. Leslie Gill, a psychology professor, has been working at ENMU for 20 years.
During that time she has worked closely with the psychology club. She enjoys getting to know the students and to continually to grow and learn how to help students.
Dr. Gill came to ENMU because she wanted to work for a teaching institution. Before coming to ENMU she was working on her two-year post-doctoral fellowship in developmental disabilities in Baltimore in John Hopkins and Kennedy Krieger institute.
She got into psychology because she wanted to be able to help people by doing research that studied how the brain works, particularly language and cognitive development and disorders. She wanted to be able to help people recover from strokes, and help children that might have a language or learning disability by knowing what is happening in their brains.
Dr. Gill started out with a bachelor’s in theatre arts then went to be a teacher’s aide in an elementary school.
“I really liked and was intrigued by what the speech language pathologist did at the elementary school so I decided to go into communicative disorders and studied that for three years and got a second bachelor’s degree. That’s what made me fall in love with the brain and language,” she said.
When she was growing up she never thought of herself as someone who was “into science.”
“In fact, that was always my go-to when teachers asked ‘What’s your favorite and least favorite subject?’ I had a hard time with the favorite but the least favorite I always put down as science. It wasn’t until I was studying communicative disorders that I found out that the things I was most interested in were science,” explained Dr. Gill.
She enjoys knowing about how neurons work on a cellular level and how that gives people a basis for everything they are.
Dr. Gill’s roommate her freshman year of college was a psychology major who told her not to even consider doing psychology because she “wouldn’t be able to handle the statistics.”
She now teaches statistics.
“So don’t tell me I can’t,” she said, “I proved her wrong.”
Becoming a teacher was always a goal of Dr. Gill’s.
“Education was highly valued in my family and something that I really cared about. I went to a smaller private liberal arts university as an undergraduate where I worked directly with professors and it was absolutely the best experience ever.
“I made the best choice in doing that. So when I was working on my doctoral degree my goal was to balance teaching and research. The teaching part of it was because I wanted to work with students directly,” explained Dr. Gill.
Her current research is looking at the mindset of people’s views on gender and sexuality.
“It’s not what I started in but I’ve moved in this direction. I’ve always had a background in people’s thinking skills, but I’ve been recently looking at ‘isms,’ like genderism and racism. I’ve been wanting to look at what the mental blocks are to viewing people and what the role of compassion is in changing people’s views and thinking about what those are,” said Dr. Gill.
She grew up in California and then moved to the Midwest for school. She went to the East Coast for a while then wanted to come back West.
“I like being in the West more than the East,” said Dr. Gill.
She also admits to missing the coast and being around water–although, she does enjoy the dry heat.
“It’s a lot better than Baltimore where the humidity was intense. Even at 80 degrees with the humidity it might as well have been 100. You couldn’t go out in it; it was miserable. Here it can be 100 degrees and it’s not that bad, especially if the wind blows,” said the married mother of two.
Dr. Gill considers herself a “closet thrill-seeker.” One of her favorite activities is white-water rafting.
“I did it as a teenager because my brother was a white water-rafter. In the last few years he’s been getting together with his rafting buddies annually and I get to go rafting with them,” she said.
