Patricia Gettings

Patricia Gettings is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany. She holds a PhD from Purdue University's Brian Lamb School of Communication. Her research focuses on the intersection of personal relationships and organizational life, emphasizing how communication mediates career trajectories, retirement processes, gender dynamics, and identity management. Key interests include work-life interface challenges, resilience in marginalized workplace contexts, and communication patterns in family systems.

Her work explores topics such as aging attitudes, transgender workplace experiences, and military family reintegration. She employs mixed methods to analyze communication strategies in contexts like mental health disclosure, career transitions, and intergenerational relationships. Her pedagogical innovations include case study methodologies that bridge classroom learning with real-world workplace scenarios.

Gettings has published extensively on retirement discourses, gender equity in male-dominated fields, and the role of communication in mediating stress and resilience. Her research often bridges macro-level societal discourses with micro-level interpersonal interactions, reflecting a commitment to both theoretical and applied communication scholarship.