EdD, 2023 Lalita Kaligotla is Professor of the Practice and Senior Director for Leadership and Engagement at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. In this role, she is responsible for advancing leadership development and community engagement opportunities for faculty, staff and students through the school’s professional development, mentorship, curricular and co-curricular programs. She has nearly two decades of experience in higher education administration, leadership development, and launching and fostering experiential and community engagement programs. Prior to moving to Emory University, she was on the faculty at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and Associate Director of the Hart Leadership Program (HLP), amongst the oldest leadership development programs in the nation. In this role, she was responsible for multiple HLP programs including the Service Opportunities in Leadership (SOL) Fellowship and Hart Fellows Program. She has developed and taught classes on civic engagement, democratic participation, and values-based leadership, including the gateway course in the SOL program, “Border Crossing: Leadership, Value Conflicts and Public Life.” Prior to that, Lalita was the founding director of the Business track of the Minor in Leadership Studies at Georgia Tech, a successful interdisciplinary program based in the Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship at the Scheller College of Business. This highly successful program focused on leadership development for undergraduate students through curricular and co-curricular programming. She designed and taught the capstone course for the Minor, “Leadership for Positive Change,” with an experiential and service oriented pedagogical focus. As part of this course, students partnered with various organizations in the city of Atlanta to address a challenge and collaboratively devise a context specific solution. Through didactic training, ethical engagement with communities, and mindful reflection, students developed their personal leadership models to guide their professional and personal journeys. Lalita also has extensive experience in project management and sponsored research development at several academic institutions including Georgia Tech and Georgia State University. Originally from Hyderabad, India, Lalita obtained her undergraduate education majoring in Psychology and Sociology at Osmania University in Hyderabad. She also completed graduate work in Social Work at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India; and in Social Policy and Business at the Mandel School of Social Sciences, and the Weatherhead School of Management, both at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
