Risk Perception During Public Health Crises

Congratulations to Dr. Janet Yang, winner of the 2024 Lewis Donohew Outstanding Scholar in Health Communication award! Dr. Yang is Professor in the Department of Communication, College of Arts and Sciences, at University of Buffalo, SUNY. Her research examines cognitive and affective determinants of risk perception and its impact on information seeking, information sharing, and information processing. She has examined the impact of risk perception on communication behaviors related to a variety of environmental and health topics, including climate change, plastic recycling, vaccination, Ebola, monkeypox, and e-cigarettes. She also conducted studies on COVID-19 and risk perception during the height of the pandemic that led to greater understanding of information dissemination, information seeking and processing, and decision making, as well as the role of misinformation. She has published numerous articles in leading communication, risk, and interdisciplinary journals. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, among others. (Read More)

Tackling Health Misinformation: Innovations and Insights

Dr. Carma Bylund is Professor and Associate Chair of Education for the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida College of Medicine. She leads education efforts for the Cancer Control and Population Sciences Program in the UF Health Cancer Center. She is also the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal PEC Innovation, the sibling journal to Patient Education & Counseling.

Dr. Bylund’s research works to develop, implement, and test communication interventions to improve clinical communication and health outcomes. Her current research is focused on cancer treatment misinformation, cancer clinical trials, and caregiver communication in clinical and family settings. Dr. Bylund has received 16 NIH grants as Principal or Co-Investigator. She has received an additional 16 grants from non-profit organizations including The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and the State of Florida. Dr. Bylund has published 174 peer-reviewed papers and has co-edited three books on Health Communication, most recently including The International Encyclopedia of Health Communication.

Dr. Bylund is the former director of the Comskil Training Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where she co-developed and implemented the first U.S. institutional-based comprehensive communication skills training program for oncologists. She also served as Associate Director of Medical Education at Hamad Medical Corporation in Doha, Qatar, where she focused on improving clinical communication skills in a multi-cultural healthcare environment. (Read More)

As part of our innovations for KCHC 2024, we are excited to offer two special topics workshops presented by two of the leading scholars in our discipline. Dr. Lynn Miller will share advice based on her decades of experience writing successful grant applications, which have led to more than $20 million in extramural funding from NIH, CDC, and DOD/DARPA. Workshop participants will have the hands-on opportunity to draft a specific aims page for an NIH application. Dr. Teri Thompson will share her expertise as the spearheading and founding editor of our discipline’s premier journal, Health Communication, a role she has held since 1989. Workshop participants will learn indispensable information for successfully publishing in top journals, as well as serving as manuscript reviewers—a skill that is essential yet rarely is taught. Each workshop will be offered twice:

Optimizing Grant Funding Success: A Workshop to Craft YOUR Specific AIMS (NIH)

Lynn Carol Miller, PhD (USC Annenberg) Dr. Miller is a research-pioneer in developing and using a variety of technologies and techniques (e.g., virtual environments; intelligent agents, computational modeling of human construction of meaning and goal-based processes for agents in games; systematic representative design; neuroscience) to assess and change the dynamics of social cognitive and interpersonal processes, including mitigating shame, impacting health (e.g., mental health; HIV/AIDS risks) and other pro-social outcomes. Funded (over $20M) by numerous institutes at the National Institutes of Health (i.e., NIMH, NIGMS, NIDA), the CDC, and a wide array of agencies in the Department of Defense/DARPA; she has published over 28 edited book chapters and 80 refereed journal articles...(Read More)

The Nuts and Bolts of Publishing and Reviewing: Tools of the Academician’s Trade

Teri Thompson, PhD (University of Dayton) Dr. Thompson's primary research interests focused upon health communication and gender and communication. Recently, she was examining messages that impacted organ donation preferences. Other areas of interest have included ethics in health communication and coping with bereavement. Her research was published in numerous scholarly journals, such as Human Communication Research, Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research, and Social Science and Medicine. However, she was more widely read through publications in sources like The Wall Street Journal and Glamour, as well as having her work mentioned on the Tonight Show. (Read More)