University of Kansas

Studies gender in political campaigns and candidate communication across ads, websites, and news, and evaluates leadership programs for civic engagement.

Designs and tests media and health literacy interventions for adolescents and uses brain measures to study how persuasive health messages work.

Studies press coverage of U.S. first ladies and women politicians, journalism history, and rural local news, using historical analysis and oral history.

Studies health communication strategies and media interventions for underserved populations, including vaccine uptake, social determinants of health, and AI in consumer health.

Studies how people build and maintain relationships through everyday interaction and communication technologies, including the social biome of daily contact.

Theorizes how public and political arguing generates persuasive force, drawing on normative pragmatics, argumentation theory, and the history of rhetoric.

Studies emotional support and coping in personal relationships and support groups, romantic relationship redefinition, gender differences, and domestic violence intervention.

Studies burnout, job change, and organizational adaptation among newspaper and television newsroom workers, along with media ethics and journalism education.

Studies why people use digital and entertainment media and its effects, including spoilers and enjoyment, social media use, and media literacy.

Analyzes argumentation and political rhetoric through rhetorical criticism, including nationalist populism in Donald Trump's rhetoric and American democracy.

Studies networked communication and its implications for collective action, civic engagement, and digital inclusion, including South Korean protest movements.

Studies race and public memory, especially the murder of Emmett Till, through historical research and public humanities projects such as apps, exhibits, and markers.

Studies intergroup and intercultural communication, linking relationships, social cognition, culture, identity, and aging in face-to-face and mediated contexts.

Studies how journalistic practices such as errors, transparency, and AI use affect audience perceptions of news accuracy and credibility.

Studies media law and ethics, including legal issues of satire and parody accounts and press privilege protections for student journalists.

Researches race and gender issues in media, drawing on a background in sports and business journalism and inclusive-language training.

Holds a journalism and mass communications faculty post after serving as dean; the profile lists teaching and administrative awards but no research focus.

Examines the intersection of rhetoric, politics, and violence, including political tone and changing norms of youth democratic engagement in the United States.

Studies consumer behavior at the intersection of new and emerging media technologies and strategic communication, advertising, and marketing.

Studies social class, stigma, and economic mobility in organizational contexts through critical, comparative, community-engaged ethnography.

Studies magazine design and how students learn, drawing on a professional background in magazine writing and editing.

Studies rhetorical theory and public culture, especially the rhetoric of economics, through psychoanalytic and cultural-studies approaches.

Studies political incivility and its effects online, including citizen perceptions, partisan incivility in news comment sections, and clickbait headlines.

Studies interracial and intercultural communication and African American rhetoric, analyzing identity, race, and power in figures such as Barack Obama and Condoleezza Rice.

Studies how socio-technical interactions, including human-machine communication and teaming with work technologies, change teams, groups, and work.

Studies how social identity, stigma, and hostile media perceptions shape political expression and mobilization on social media among Latino communities, using multi-method designs.

Studies pedagogy and teaching evaluation in higher education, digital literacy, and data visualization, and builds web, app, and bot tools for teaching.

Studies family communication, linking communication processes to mental health, family functioning, and relationship quality, and examines leadership program effectiveness.

Studies access to quality news in rural communities and sustainable local news models, scholastic student media, and science communication on social media.

Studies persuasive effects of messages, images, and emotions in environmental and public health risk communication and political advertising.

Studies public relations in sports, focusing on team-fan relationships, name-image-likeness partnerships, crisis communication, and mental health messaging.

Examines the ethics of health marketing in reproductive and maternal care, such as prenatal testing ads, using critical theory and qualitative methods.

Studies media representations of crime, community information needs and storytelling, and digital technology adoption in rural communities.

Examines journalistic representations and negotiations of American Indian identity, past and present, through journalism history research.

Uses network analysis, NLP, and machine learning on digital trace and longitudinal survey data to study health and political information processing and misinformation diffusion.

Studies political communication, media effects, and deliberation in conflict contexts, including populism and intergroup emotions in the U.S. and Latin America.

Examines how stigma as a power-laden communication process shapes health inequities in mental, reproductive, and autoimmune health through critical-interpretive research.

Studies health communication, misinformation, and user experience with emerging media, using NLP, computer vision, and mixed methods to serve marginalized communities.

Studies narrative persuasion, health communication, and children's understanding of media, focusing on emotional responses, attitude change, and knowledge across the lifespan.

Studies news literacy, media trust, and misinformation, including news skepticism and cynicism and the gap between journalism research and practice.