2026 FAQs

Absolutely! We encourage anyone with an interest in health communication to attend, whether they be graduate students, early-career scholars, tenure track or tenured faculty, clinical researchers, healthcare providers, representatives from non-profit or governmental organizations, or industry professionals. Although the majority of our attendees are health communication scholars, we regularly have attendees who specialize in other communication-related areas, such as risk and crisis communication, as well as attendees from outside the academy.

KCHC has three categories of paper awards: top student paper, top early career scholar paper, and top conference paper. Here are the criteria for the:

• Top Student Paper: Papers submitted for consideration as the top student paper must be written entirely by students at the master's or doctoral level. Papers may be single or multi-authored. All authors must be students.
• Top Early Career Scholar/Scholar-led Paper: Papers submitted for consideration as top early career scholar/scholar-led paper must be led by an author who has received their PhD within the last five years. Papers may be single or multi-authored. If the paper has multiple authors, the first author must be an early career scholar; co-authors may have any rank, including student.
• Top Conference Paper: All papers that do not meet the criteria for consideration as top student or top early career scholar paper may be submitted for consideration as the top conference paper.

Some additional considerations:

• In the event that an author submits an abstract as a student but will be attending the conference as an early-career scholar/professional, that paper should be submitted for consideration as a top student paper. However, these individuals may only register for the conference as a student (and, hence, receive the discounted student registration rate) if they have not yet graduated from their program.
• The category to which you submit your final paper must adhere to the authors who were included in the abstract submission. For instance, an abstract that is submitted with faculty co-authors and is then accepted as a paper will not be considered for top student paper if the final paper is submitted with the faculty co-authors’ name removed.

Detailed information about this question is available here.

We recommend that you follow standard guidelines for research posters when creating your poster. The most important thing to keep in mind, from our perspective, is the size. Posters should not be any bigger than 4’ H by 8’ W. Please refrain from printing numerous 8.5” by 11” sheets of paper in lieu of a poster.

Please contact us at kchc@lsv.uky.edu and let us know the title of your abstract, and we’ll get back in touch with you as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, given the size of our conference, we don’t have need for volunteers beyond our own staff like larger conferences do. We do our best to offer substantially reduced registration rates for students, though. And registration includes continental breakfasts each day, as well as lunch on Saturday (conference awards banquet), so out-of-pocket meal expenses are reduced.

It depends! Generally, though, most attendees will pay for travel, lodging, meals not provided by the conference, and incidental expenses.

Some additional considerations:

• Some meals are included as part of your registration. These include full breakfasts each morning and lunch on Saturday. We do offer meal options for persons with dietary restrictions, which you can note when you register.
• The Hyatt provides a free shuttle service to/from the airport. Please note that the hotel requires a 10-minute advance notice for shuttle requests.
• Free on-site parking is available across the street from the host hotel in the Civic Center lot (enter from High Street).
• Free Wi-Fi is available throughout the conference venue. Please note, however, that it is not secure.

The earlier you book your hotel, the better. April is a very busy month in Lexington, so we strongly urge you to make your reservations early—certainly no later than the deadline to receive the discounted room rate.

If there is no availability in the host hotel, there are other hotels nearby, which you can see on our Accommodations page.

It's great (at least we think so!). Here's some information that can help you make the most out of your time in Lexington, courtesy of the Lexington Visitors Center:

• About Lexington
• Things to do in Lexington
• Where to eat in Lexington
• Where to stay in Lexington
• Keeneland, our renowned horse racing venue, will run from Friday, April 3, 2026, to Friday, April 24, 2026. We highly recommend you check it out if your schedule permits.

Well, this is a tricky question. The short answer is yes. However, professional conferences typically discourage multiple submissions by the same author. An important caveat is this: We expect that many of our attendees will be members of research teams, so having one’s name included as a contributor on multiple abstracts is entirely reasonable. However, we generally discourage submission of multiple abstracts with the same individual listed as the first author.

Each paper/poster abstract is distributed to three readers for blind review. Each is assigned a rating (raw score) from 0 to 100 by each of the three reviewers. The raw rating scores are converted to standard scores (z-scores) with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1 to aid in accounting for differences in reviewers’ use of the 0-100 scale. Each reviewer also indicates whether the abstract should be accepted (yes/no) and to what extent it fits the conference theme (strongly agree to strongly disagree). Following traditional criteria, programming decisions are based on a combination of average z-scores and number of “yes” votes. Paper programming decisions are also based on consistency with session themes as they emerge from submissions and as they fit with conference theme.

Panel proposals are reviewed by a group of senior scholars who evaluated them through discussion and ranking. Programming decisions are based on the extent to which panels address important research issues in health communication and are consistent with the conference theme.