Lisa is a Professor of Design and the Director of WonderLab at Monash University, Australia. Lisa grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand with a whakapapa to Ngāti Kahungunu on her mother’s side and Pākehā from Waikato on her father’s side. She currently lives in Melbourne, Australia with her two children raised in multiple countries.

Lisa is a design researcher who thrives on collaborating with interdisciplinary teams on organisational and team transformation projects. After more than a decade at Parsons School of Design in New York, she currently leads the Future of Work and Learning research program in the Emerging Technologies Lab at Monash University. Lisa’s translational research is published in academic journals and has been awarded funding from government and industry, including the Australia Research Council funded project: Innovative Learning Environments and Teacher Change. Design for Transformative Learning: A design-led approach to memory-making and perspective-shifting is her recent monograph published by Routledge.

In the US she worked with grit, belonging and mindset researchers. In Australia, she has collaborated with learning scientists, organizational change and queer methodologists while drawing on practice expertise and Indigenous knowing. These experiences bring an interdisciplinary perspective to how her creative research scaffolds for people new ways of knowing, doing and being in the world. In co-creating with diverse partners, the translational research works with future-focused methodologies to unsettle out-of-date mental models, shift learning mindsets and envisage never-before-seen work practices and learning processes. 

Lisa has decades of leadership experience including roles as the Dean of Academic Initiatives at Parsons in New York and Head of Design at Monash in Melbourne.