University of Florida

Studies AI in advertising, cultural and social media dynamics, consumer behavior and digital marketing, and AI in education and learning.

Studies corporate purpose, investor relations and financial communication, and how companies use digital and social media to engage stakeholders.

Studies how communication helps or hinders democratic processes, focusing on why people seek out disagreeing views and how they process political disagreement.

Studies persuasion and resistance to persuasion, developing inoculation theory and message design across commercial, health, political and crisis contexts.

Studies public relations and advertising communication by organizations, including consumer responses to chatbots and the perceived humanness of online organizational agents.

Studies political public relations and the interplay among public relations efforts, news media content and public opinion in domestic and global contexts.

Studies the effects and design of immersive media such as video games, streaming and VR to promote better decisions and prosocial behavior.

Studies information, communication and technology with a view toward law and policy, focusing on privacy, online media and communities.

Studies internal communication, leadership communication, emerging technologies and entrepreneurial communication in corporations and startups.

Studies how digital and AI-enabled communication and media credibility shape community storytelling, news trust and civic engagement across diverse communities.

Studies the historical and contemporary telecommunications policy process and how policy actors respond to emerging technologies, including in the European Union.

Studies cognitive processing, communication effects and message persuasion in social issue advocacy, health communication and cross-cultural audiences.

Studies how news media cover health, how audiences use health news, its influence on health policy, and media effects on adolescent sexual health.

Studies how media technologies and online platforms shape political information flows and the emergence of new ideas and ideologies.

Studies journalism, technology and politics in emerging democracies of Southeast Europe, focusing on citizen engagement with quality news and civic behavior.

Studies how people perceive and act on health and environmental risks, including infectious disease prevention and sustainability, and how AI may shape public health messaging.

Studies sports journalism and media coverage of international sporting events, including press conferences and newspaper coverage of women's sports.

Studies youth substance use prevention, health and cancer disparities, and community engagement in the U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islands through formative and intervention research.

Studies the uses and effects of negative information in persuasive messages and how social and traditional media serve as strategic tools in political campaigns.

Works in advertising, health and visual communication; her dissertation examined how media images of ultra-thin women shape body image and eating disorder-related behaviors.

Studies race, gender and class in media, Black feminism and social movements through critical and historical analysis of news, TV and Black Twitter activism.

Studies why messages succeed or fail at changing attitudes on environmental, science and political issues, and how attitudes drive information seeking and media avoidance.

Studies why and how people select and share persuasive messages on new media, focusing on impression management, social comparison and self-regulation.

Studies multiethnic community building, organization-public relationships, public agencies' social media disaster communication, and COVID-19 vaccine acceptance.

Studies social media dynamics, especially how misinformation spreads online and the role of fact-checking.

Studies the psychology of new technology and online storytelling, including automated news, online comments and social television.

Studies the advertising industry, especially creativity inside agencies and practitioner perspectives on how advertising works.

Studies how people perceive and interact with social robots, virtual agents and VR/AR, using lab experiments, psychophysiology and computational methods.

Studies how people process and respond to narrative media, from entertainment TV to terrorist propaganda, using experiments informed by moral psychology.

Studies new media advertising and human-computer interaction, especially how AI- and human-driven virtual humans use storytelling to shape brand perceptions.

Studies social interaction in immersive virtual and mixed reality environments and how physical, virtual and social context shapes these interactions.

Studies how communities use local media infrastructure such as community video, radio and press to build identity and civic life, via community-engaged participatory research.

Studies how communicator cues shape perceived expertise, credibility and trust in scientists and medical authorities, including science-related populism.

Studies health communication and disease prevention by examining the content and effects of mass media, social media and AI-mediated public health messages.

Studies how people and institutions judge the trustworthiness and legitimacy of AI and algorithmic communication, including responsible AI and AI-driven advertising.

Studies how AI reshapes advertising and human-technology interaction, focusing on how people calibrate trust in conversational and agentic AI.

Studies how affordances of new media technologies shape communication behaviors and the effectiveness of persuasive messages, including health and social media persuasion.