Dr. Jennifer Cates is a core faculty member in the online MA/PsyD/PhD programs at Alliant International University. She has been teaching, supervising, and engaging in scholarship as a full-time faculty member since 2006. Additionally, she has been practicing as a couple and family therapist since 2002.

She served as the Chair for the Couple and Family Therapy Department at Regis University from 2013 through 2024, and she was a core faculty in the COAMFTE accredited master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy Program from 2010 through 2024. Prior to that, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Central Washington University from 2006 through 2010, where she taught in the couple and family therapy track of a CACREP accredited counseling training program.

Her passion is teaching, supervising, and mentoring students and new professionals to be effective clinicians by increasing their awareness of their own cultural contexts so that they are better able to understand how their own and the cultural contexts of their clients inform the therapeutic process and outcomes.

She has published and presented on topics including white racial identity development, effective methods for integrating cultural context into the therapeutic process, social justice interventions, and supervision and training process and outcomes. An emphasis on cultural context and social justice is integrated into her teaching, supervision, and scholarship.