College Partners
Department of Advertising
Brad Love, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor. Ph.D., Michigan State University (Media and Information Studies); B.S., University of Florida (Journalism). His primary research interests include investigating the persuasive capabilities of mass media, particularly as applied to pro-social topics such as public health. This includes examining the social and psychological elements necessary for persuasion and the influence that digital media can have on the process. Love's research has appeared in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine, and Disease Management and Health Outcomes. In addition to working in journalism and concert promotions, Love has also taught several courses at the University of Florida and Michigan State University, where he was recognized with a campus-wide teaching award.
Liza Stavchansky Lewis, Ph.D.
Lecturer
Phone: 512-471-1101
LeeAnn Kahlor, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Phone: 512-471-8498
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
Phone: 512-471-8558
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
Phone: 512-471-8152
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.
Jerome Williams, Ph.D.
F.J. Heyne Centennial Professor in Communication
Phone: 512-471-7302
Dr. Williams’ research interests cover a number of areas in the consumer marketing and advertising domains, with particular emphasis on multicultural advertising and marketing issues. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Food Marketing and Diets of Children and Youth that authored the recently released report Food Marketing to Children and Youth: Threat or Opportunity? The study was requested by Congress and sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He currently is conducting a national study in five cities on the linkages between billboard and magazine media targeting ethnic minority populations, food purchases using scanner data, TV viewing using Nielsen data, health indicators, and other factors. He has testified in a number of court cases as an expert witness on consumer response to advertising strategies, especially on topics dealing with target marketing and consumer racial profiling. His research has appeared in numerous journals and books. He is co-editor of Diversity in Advertising (Erlbaum).
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Craig Champlin, Ph.D.
Professor
Phone: 512-471-6345
Dr. Champlin teaches courses in hearing science, instrumentation, electrophysiological audiometry, and hearing conservation. As a member of the Institute for Neuroscience, he also team teaches a course that covers the principles of neuroscience. Dr. Champlin's research focuses on physiological correlates of auditory perception, the effects of noise on hearing, spectro temporal processing of sound, and otoacoustic emissions. He has received numerous research grants, most of which have targeted the study of auditory evoked potentials in humans. Dr. Champlin has published research articles in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Hearing Research, Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, and others. In addition, Dr. Champlin has been a consultant on projects dealing with community noise issues, hearing conservation education in children, and infant hearing screening.
Barbara Davis, Ph.D.
Professor
Phone: 512-471-1929
Dr. Davis’s current research and scholarly interests are in the area of speech acquisition and relationships of phonetic patterns in acquisition to phonological patterns observed in mature speakers. The larger theoretical perspective in her work relates to considerations of the variety of child intrinsic capacities embedded in a rich matrix of environmental support that enables emergence of an ambient phonology. In particular, she is presently interested in exploring the interface of production system characteristics and perceptual influences. Relative to the question of interface of production system characteristics and perceptual influences, her research has centered on vocal development in infants identified in the first six months of life with profound hearing impairment who receive cochlear implants as well as emergence of vocal patterns in children with varying degrees of hearing loss. As a result of research examining babies’ “babble”, Dr. Davis has identified a series of consonant-vowel combinations suggesting that spoken language could have evolved from “baby babble.” This research could have a significant impact on helping children overcome obstacles to speech acquisition via early detection by parents. Dr. Davis is also interested in translation of these basic research questions into understanding of clinical populations in which the circumstances of speech acquisition are either different or delayed. In particular she has focused on children whose speech acquisition is considered severely speech delayed.
Jan Moore, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Phone: 512-232-1804
Department of Communication Studies
Matthew McGlone, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Dr. McGlone investigates the cognitive, cultural, and psychological foundations of interpersonal communication and persuasion. His primary research interest is the communication strategies people use to talk about topics that are difficult to talk about. He has studied people's use of euphemism to discuss embarrassing (sex, bodily functions) and upsetting topics (violence, prejudice, death), their use of metaphor to describe abstract concepts (time, justice, intelligence), and their use of "contextomy" (quoting out of context) to discuss sociopolitical issues (affirmative action, abortion, gun control) in self-serving ways. His research has appeared in Communication Monographs, Poetics, Psychology of Women Quarterly, and Media, Culture, & Society. Dr. McGlone has received grants from the National Science Foundation to support his scholarly pursuits, including a 2002 Research Opportunity Award for his work on stereotype threat and academic achievement. As a 2001-2003 NSF Research Fellow at NYU's Center for Research on Culture, Development, and Education, he explored an alternative explanation for these problems based on the psychology of stigma, focusing on “stereotype threat” -- a form of testing anxiety experienced by members of stigmatized groups who fear that a poor performance will be seen by others as evidence for a negative stereotype. Stereotype threat engenders a number of behavioral and affective responses, many of which interfere with intellectual performance and academic motivation.
School of Journalism
Renita Coleman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Dr. Coleman’s research focuses mainly on visual communication and ethics. Her recent work in health communication includes examining the public health model of reporting violence in television news magazines and creating more effective HIV/AIDS messages for African Americans. Her research on “Testing the Impact of Public Health Framing and Rich Sourcing in Health News Stories” was funded by the California Endowment. Her work has been published in Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and Journalism Studies. She is co-author with Lee Wilkins of the University of Missouri, of the 2005 book, The Moral Media: How Journalists Reason About Ethics.
Department of Radio, Television, and Film
Karin Wilkins, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Phone: 512-471-2007
Department of Communication Studies
Erin Donovan-Kicken, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Phone: 512-232-7723
Dr. Erin Donovan-Kicken (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008) specializes in interpersonal and health communication. Her research centers on the ways that people communicatively cope with major life stressors. The primary foci of her work involve the strategic management of sensitive information and difficult conversations, especially pertaining to health and illness. She is interested in the nuances of self-disclosure and topic avoidance, for example, how message features (e.g., goal-relevant information) and people’s perceptions of talk (e.g., explanations for communication behaviors) have implications for relationship satisfaction, uncertainty management, and health. Her current projects examine how communication with significant others, including loved ones and professionals, factors into how people navigate conditions such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, and depression. Her work has appeared in publications such as Human Communication Research, Health Communication, and Personal Relationships. Dr. Donovan-Kicken teaches courses in interpersonal communication, health communication, and persuasion.