Directors
LeeAnn Kahlor, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Advertising
Phone: 512-471-8498
Fax: 512-471-7018
Dr. Kahlor’s primary research interest is in health and environmental risk communication with an emphasis on information processing. Other areas of research that interest her include television viewing and political communication. She has won awards from the International Communication Association and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication for her research on science communication and television viewing. Prior to and throughout her graduate education, Kahlor was a reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel, a Corporate Communications specialist for Ameritech (now SBC) and the Communications Officer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation National Program Office "Paths to Recovery." She recently received grant funding from the UT Center for Women’s and Gender Studies to study the promotion of folic acid usage to prevent neural tube defects in Mexican-born immigrants and funding from UT’s Center for Health Promotion Research (with Michael Mackert) to examine use and processing of online information in low health literate audiences. Her work has appeared in Science Communication, Public Understanding of Science, Risk Analysis, Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Media Psychology and the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media.
Michael Mackert, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Advertising
Phone: 512-471-8558
Fax: 512-471-7018
Dr. Mackert's primary research interest is telemedicine, the provision of healthcare from a distance via telecommunication technology. He is also interested in health communication, with a particular focus on how trust plays a role in the communication process. Other interests include health literacy as it pertains to advertising and the effective communication of health and online communities. He recently received grant funding (with LeeAnn Kahlor) from UT’s Center for Health Promotion Research (CHPR) to learn more about the cultural and socioeconomic factors influencing the use and processing of online information in low health literate audiences. Most recently his research has appeared in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, Telemedicine and e-Health, the International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, the Journal of Palliative Care, and the Journal of School Health.
Pat Stout, Ph.D.
John P. McGovern Regents Professor in Health and Medical Science Communication, Department of Advertising
Phone: 512-471-8152
Fax: 512-471-7018
Dr. Stout's research focuses on viewer response to persuasive messages and advertising, with particular interest on individuals' emotional response to messages delivered online via the Web. She is interested in the effectiveness of health-promotion messages and the use of social marketing. Her work on health-related media messages and mental illness stigma has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the Hogg Foundation. Her work has been published in Journal of Advertising, Psychology & Marketing, Journalism Quarterly, Health Education Research, Schizophrenia Bulletin, and various book chapters and conference proceedings. Dr. Stout has served as a co-director of the Center for Health Promotion Research (CHPR) in the School of Nursing at UT Austin since 2000. She has been a visiting research professor at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, with the AIDS Information and Education Program.