University of South Carolina

Studies ethics in public relations and strategic communication, including AI ethics, issues management, internal communication, and emergency management.

Studies family and marital communication from a social-psychological perspective, with additional work in text and discourse studies.

Studies consumer-brand relationships and consumer engagement in advertising and social media, using data science.

Studies how social issues in health, science, and politics are presented in the news and how that coverage affects audiences, using content analysis.

Studies how practitioners develop health messages and how audiences access and comprehend health information across media, using quantitative and qualitative methods.

Studies how mass media shape beliefs, attitudes, and stigma about mental health, focusing on military veterans and elite athletes in news and sports media.

Studies public relations, crisis communication, and corporate social advocacy through rhetorical and critical lenses, with attention to race, class, and public memory.

Studies First Amendment legal history, news coverage of lynchings, and representations of African Americans in media using framing, collective memory, and cultivation analysis.

Studies how urban youth of color use social media, hip-hop, and creator culture for self-expression, identity, and learning.

Studies how technology, especially AI, shapes the creative process and the teaching of creativity in advertising and communication education.

Studies local sports broadcasters in the United States, including career challenges, race and gender, and sports communication education, mainly through surveys.

Studies cancer and tobacco control communication, health information disparities, and minorities' coping with racism, including analysis of social media discourse.

Studies visual communication and international journalism through photojournalism, graphics, and photo essays.

Produces photojournalism and documentary video on migration, faith, multicultural issues, and sustainable agriculture.

Studies visual journalism, content creators, and audience credibility perceptions of news images, plus visual stereotyping, using eye-tracking, scale development, and content analysis.

Studies emergency and risk communication, including message design, organizational response, and digital platforms during hazards, using quantitative and qualitative methods.

Studies media law, including how social and new media affect courts and juries, defamation, reporter's privilege, and freedom of information, through legal analysis.

Studies emotions in advertising, marketing, and health messages, measuring consumer responses with experiments and psychophysiological tools such as eye-tracking and fMRI.

Studies the psychological effects of advertising and digital media on consumers, especially reactions to AI in advertising and strategic communication, using social-scientific empirical methods.

Studies human-AI and human-robot interaction and trust in emerging technologies, using biometric measures, experiments, surveys, and network and big data analytics.

Studies human-AI interaction and designs adaptive, context-aware intelligent systems, combining computational methods, behavioral experiments, and human-centered design.

Studies how social movements such as Black Lives Matter use visual and textual messaging on social media to mobilize, through a public relations lens.

Studies how organizational communication, data, and regulation shape environmental accountability and risk, including PFAS water quality, sustainability reporting, and carbon markets.

Designs immersive virtual environments with communities to support education, youth engagement, and public understanding of environmental health.

Studies code switching and self-presentation across social, cultural, and organizational contexts under stigma, drawing on communication neuroscience.

Develops and tests tobacco and cancer prevention messages for youth and young adults, using online and lab experiments, ecological momentary assessment, and surveys.

Studies how media use and social relationships stabilize or change partisan and political identities, using longitudinal surveys and quantitative methods, and builds R packages.

Studies decision-making about risky health, environmental, and traffic-safety behaviors, examining message framing and social media health information seeking with mixed methods.

Studies how platforms, algorithms, and neoliberal discourses regulate and commodify Black identity, focusing on Black influencers, creators, and digital labor.

Studies multicultural and global public relations, nonprofit communication, CSR perceptions, and organization-public relationships, including comparisons of US and Chinese publics.