Nancy Harrington

Bio

Nancy Grant Harrington (PhD, 1992, University of Kentucky) is a University Research Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Kentucky. She also holds an academic appointment in the UK College of Public Health, is a faculty associate of the UK Multidisciplinary Center on Drug and Alcohol Research, and is a founding faculty associate of the UK Center on Health Equity Transformation. Harrington’s research focuses on persuasive message design for health behavior change interventions and challenging conversations in healthcare. She has been principal investigator, co-investigator, principal evaluator, or consultant on several NIH-funded and CDC-funded studies totaling more than $10 million. She has published close to 100 journal articles, chapters, and encyclopedia entries and has authored or edited four books, with a fifth book in process. In recognition of her research excellence, she was named a Fellow of the International Communication Association in 2023. Harrington teaches persuasive message design and advanced theory construction at the graduate level, as well as undergraduate classes in communication theory, research methods, and health communication, among others. She has chaired or co-chaired 34 graduate student committees to completion and served as a member on 30 others. In recognition of her mentoring, she was awarded the National Communication Association Health Communication Division’s Dale E. Brashers Distinguished Mentor Award in 2016. Harrington serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Health Communication, Prevention Science, and Science Communication. She served as guest editor for special issues of Journal of Communication and Health Communication. She served as chair to the Health Communication division of the National Communication Association from 2004-2005, and she is a founding member and steering committee member of the Society for Health Communication. Harrington is director of the internationally-recognized Kentucky Conference on Health Communication, a role she has held since 1999, and is director of the College of Communication and Information’s Health Communication Research Collaborative, a group of faculty and graduate students working to foster interdisciplinary research collaborations in health communication across the University of Kentucky.