Lisa Warren, DO, MBA, CEO, followed in her father’s footsteps in becoming a pediatrician; now her career has come full-circle as she returns to her alma mater as Dean of Western University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific and COMP-Northwest.
“It always starts with the people around you,” Warren said. “They’re the individuals who influence and really inspire you.”
Warren’s parents met while her dad was in medical school and her mother, who is from Mexico, taught her daughters the importance of being an advocate for others and “serving the underserved.” Warren and her three younger sisters, all of whom ended up in the healthcare field, grew up talking about medicine at home and seeing the positive ways her father impacted the community.
“You go to the grocery store and run into all his patients and then we’re like, ‘Oh, here’s another one, dad’s talking to patients,’ you know, and it’s just such a lovely connection and experience,” Warren explained.
Warren seeks to keep up engagement and “pour into” the community, as well as working with state officials to maintain positive change and agendas.
“Lebanon has been so gracious to COMP-Northwest and embracing it as their family,” Warren said. “They’re a very family-oriented community.”
Prior to her transition to dean, Warren served as WesternU’s Clinical Chair of Pediatrics, among other roles, and, according to the university, assisted in leading COMP and COMP-Northwest’s medical curriculum “transformation.” Warren held the title of Assistant Dean for Graduate Medical Education as well, where she helped establish and develop new residency programs.
“As the dean, I do a lot of that in my own way,” Warren explained, “but I also build teams and recruit individuals who help serve those different pieces of the puzzle.”
While Warren and her family currently live in California, she said she plans to split her time evenly between Lebanon and Pomona, Calif., and she’s keeping an eye out for a place to settle in and get involved with the Lebanon community. Warren said she loves yoga and looks forward to jogging by the river.
“I just feel like you can’t serve (a community) unless you’re part of it,” Warren said.
After a decade living in Temple, Texas, which is a similar size to Lebanon, Warren believes she knows what it takes to be part of a small-town community. She said she’s been visiting Lebanon biweekly as much as possible, getting to know people and preparing for upcoming events.
“I’m just excited, I love it,” Warren said of Lebanon. “It’s such a calming, beautiful community of individuals.”
Warren said her door is always open and she wants to hear from Lebanon community members.
“I just hope that, whenever I’m in town, I will be walking on Main Street and getting to eat and share in the community,” Warren said. “So I welcome everybody to just come and say hello; I’m open, transparent and just excited to be a part of this.”
Warren found her medical school in WesternU’s California campus, where she earned her Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree in 2001, and met her husband; they have two boys together.
“(In med school) you try all different things and pediatrics was the natural fit, I just love kids,” Warren said. “It’s just a place where I felt like I can make a difference.”
Warren completed her residency at Baylor Scott and White/Texas A&M in 2004, and achieved a Healthcare Executive MBA from the University of California in 2019. WesternU said Warren’s “unique combination of medical expertise and business acumen” makes her a great choice for dean, equipped to be an effective leader within the complex healthcare system.
Beyond medical care, Warren is “passionate” about helping families learn the best way to raise their kids, giving parents reassurance and encouragement and making sure they have the “tools and resources” they need.
Leadership is no stranger to Warren; she finished her training in Temple, Texas, and had the opportunity to direct the residency program and train incoming trainees.
“I just loved it,” Warren said. “It was challenging, but I knew I was in an academic environment that really helped support me and give me tools and skills and experiences. I learned a lot about myself and I found that the way I engaged and interacted with the patients and the families has a very translatable and similar type of way in which you can lead teams.”
As an alumna, Warren knew she wanted to come back to WesternU, and that it would be a place where she could “grow as a leader,” though she didn’t know she would end up being dean of COMP at the time. Warren ended up back at Western in 2011, where she founded the Office of Career and Professional Development for students seeking mentoring and resources.
“I built a team that now really created a great success in making sure all our students who want to pursue certain training get the jobs that they want, because ultimately that’s the satisfaction,” explained Warren. “We want people to be in the right place for the right passions, and they need mentoring and skills.”
Per WesternU, Warren upheld oversight across both campuses as the founding director of OCPD, increasing the capacity of the department to meet student needs; during the past seven years, the college scored 5% higher than the national benchmark for residency placement on average.
During the past decade, Warren directed OCPD in addition to her other roles and continued her work in pediatrics. When she began exploring options for the next step in her career, she knew she had a passion for making things better, but had to “assess” the dean position thoroughly before deciding to pursue it.
“I have that vigor and excitement and that’s why I chose to pursue it,” Warren explained. “It just felt like the right time in the right place, and I have the right energy right now to do it. So it all worked out and here I am.”
Warren was also a Costin Scholar at the Costin Institute for Osteopathic Educators, has earned an MBA degree, and served as CEO and Designated Institutional Official of Osteopathic Postdoctoral Training Institution – West. Her role at OPTI had oversight across multiple states, training programs and individual organizations, and WesternU said she drove “significant improvements” for residency development.
“This is a big jump,” Warren said. “I had worked for career development on both campuses because, with that, our students share a lot of similar resources, but this was a very different and new skill set of being more (involved in) the external side, and community and government relations.”
With her family encouraging her, Warren said she’s at a place in her career where she has lots of ideas and “a lot to give” as she serves the teams at both WesternU campuses. Warren wants COMP and COMP-Northwest to collectively be the top medical school in the country, serving communities with the best of the best in future healthcare providers.
Components of elevating WesternU to that level include emphasizing their “excellent” curriculum, faculty, staff and communities. Warren said she would like to see more opportunities for students to get clinical mentoring; she hopes to bring in additional specialty mentors and clinical faculty to give students the necessary clinical and research experience to build the skills they’ll need for their future careers.
“We have a small-but-mighty team but, you know, it’s becoming more and more competitive for students,” Warren explained. “We want to ensure that they get very personalized mentorship and education.”
For Lebanon’s COMP-Northwest, Warren wants to develop their footprint and vision for the campus over the next few years
“It’s my vision to but it’s a super precedent to (create) this campus of interprofessional collaboration with other health professionals, and at the same time to having our unique COMP-Northwest medical school with a state-of-the-art simulation center, really providing that up to date medical information, not only how to take care of sick patients, but also how to make our communities well.”
Within training for students, Warren wants to emphasize a “well-system” that includes taking care of all aspects of one’s life, from healthy lifestyles with nutrition and exercise, to mental health and wellbeing, allowing both the student and their future patients to live “fruitful” and “high quality” lives. The well-system needs a curriculum that reflects those goals, and “reinforcing” the osteopathic philosophy: mind, body, spirit.
“How do we (integrate that) in our day to day interactions with each other, and also with our patients in our community?” Warren asked of the program. “As students go from the classroom into the clinical setting…my goal is that they continue to feel comfortable in reinforcing these hand-skills and techniques because it’s such a unique component to what makes us different.”
Though Warren knows a lot of the upcoming goals are “lofty,” she believes they already have the pieces, now they just need to be “reinforced and reinvigorated,” and she looks forward to being a “champion and role model” of those elements. She wants people to feel confident in finding the right path forward, and she plans to prioritize maintaining COCA accreditation standards, resources and engagement for everyone from staff and students to alumni.
COCA, or the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation, is part of the American Osteopathic Association. The AOA is the main certifying organization for doctors of osteopathic medicine, or DOs. They represent nearly 200,000 osteopathic med students and physicians all over the US. According to COCA, osteopathic medicine is a rapidly growing field in health care, with a quarter of med students attending an osteopathic program.
Warren also wants to create “continuum” via philanthropic opportunities, alumni engagement and more to continue building community.
“I’m learning; it’s really setting a vision for the college,” Warren said. “For me, my vision is just empowering every individual within our college to discover and share their talents and skills for the mission of (WesternU), which is to train humanistic, compassionate, technically competent osteopathic physicians.”