2016 NCA Award Winners
NCA’s annual awards were bestowed on several distinguished members at the Annual Convention in Philadelphia. Below is the list of those who were honored at the NCA Presidential Address and Awards Presentation
Teaching Awards
Donald H. Ecroyd Award for Outstanding Teaching in Higher Education
Professor Beall receives this award in recognition of her outstanding contributions to teaching, scholarship and service in advancing Communication education. That Professor Beall has won numerous teaching awards speaks to her effectiveness at engaging students through an active learning process where they are challenged to achieve high professional expectations and where they are treated with respect. As a scholar, Professor Beall’s contributions are manifest through her focus on the importance and effectiveness of sound pedagogy and curricular content, particularly from the basic course. Her service to the discipline is reflected in her active participation in and leadership of disciplinary associations, boards and committees at the state, regional, national and international levels as well as through significant leadership roles in her department and university. As described in one of her nominating letters, Professor Beall’s career is effectively melds together the important areas of teaching, scholarship and service in creative and highly effective ways.
Marcella E. Oberle Award for Outstanding Teaching in Grades K-12
Gay Ann Brasher is an exceptional educator. She has dedicated her 50-year teaching career to improving the speaking skills of students; first in Louisiana, and then for 46 years in the San Jose Unified Public Schools. Her students have included English language learners, migrant students, and students from all age ranges. Additionally, she has developed and leads a speech and debate program at Leland High School that is consistently ranked in the top two spots in the nation since 2000. Now semi-retired, Ms. Brasher teaches two classes a day at Leland High School and spends the remainder of her time with elementary and middle school students and in managing one of the largest speech and debate teams in the country. She also has developed a middle school speech and debate tournament which attracts up to 700 students a year. Her students learn leadership, confidence and the value of hard work. According to her colleagues, her enthusiasm and dedication is reflected in her high school students’ commitment to paying it forward by teaching students in lower grades and by their successes.
Anthony Figliola has taught at Holy Ghost Preparatory School in Cornwells Heights, Pennsylvania since 1980. During that time he has excelled as a classroom teacher by emphasizing the importance of communication. He has developed the highly successful sophomore-level Communication Skills Curriculum—a year-long course with one semester of speaking and one semester of writing. A recent graduate survey named Mr. Figliola’s course the most popular and useful course at HGPS. He also established an Advanced Communication Skills course and a Dramatic Performance course. Outside of the classroom, Mr. Figliola is the nationally recognized director of Holy Ghost’s forensics program. His teaching and mentoring does not stop, however, with his own students but extends to all of the students he judges in forensics tournaments across the country and at NSDA and NCFL nationals. Marcella Oberle was once described as “skilled at establishing a very close relationship with her students.” Mr. Figliola shares this achievement. Even more notably, he has great respect from students within the entire forensics community. As one noted when he appeared to judge a final round at Nationals, his judging would be fair and each student would receive a detailed and thought-provoking ballot.
Michael and Suzanne Osborn Community College Outstanding Educator Award
Although her students have been honored with numerous awards and she has received teaching and coaching awards, Dr. Wilhite's colleagues and this selection committee observe that education and teamwork are far more important than trophies for her. Dr. Wilhite’s dedication to her school and her students is evident in all she has accomplished. Particularly impressive is the wide range of work that Dr. Wilhite has been involved with in her community. The totality of her work is invaluable in contributing to the success of those in her classes, her community and in elevating the profile of the Communication discipline in a most positive way. Holly Michelle Deeley Wilhite's career work is a living and growing tribute to outstanding education in community college.
Wallace A. Bacon Lifetime Teaching Excellence Award
Em Griffin retired from the Communication Department at Wheaton College in 2003 after 33 years of teaching and scholarship. Letter writers, all former students, describe a teacher who is dedicated to “rigor, kindness and unfailing supportiveness toward his students.” They also describe a teacher who helped students reject simple answers and develop a hunger for understanding the complexity of communication in their lives. Each letter writer, and the Awards committee, also recognized the importance of his textbook, A First Look at Communication Theory. Now in its 9th edition, this book has defined how thousands of undergraduates come to understand the Communication discipline.
Scholarship Awards
Bernard J. Brommel Award for Outstanding Scholarship or Distinguished Service in Family Communication
By any metric, Laura Stafford has been a highly-productive scholar, authoring approximately 70 publications [40 journal articles, three books (authored or edited), and multiple chapters and book reviews]. What sets her apart, however, is that her work consistently pushes the field of Communication in new directions; her work truly stands the test of time. Stafford’s research on relational maintenance as well as her research on distance and communication have influenced multiple generations of researchers, and her groundbreaking book (with C. Bayer) on parent-child communication, published in 1993, titled Interaction Between Parents and Children (Sage), was among the “first to offer an interdisciplinary integration of research on parent-child interaction.” She produced these works (and continues to make significant contributions) while assuming major service and administrative roles (e.g., founding member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Family Communication, Editor of the Journal of Applied Communication Research, Associate Editor of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Department Chair at University Kentucky, and Director of School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University). The committee agrees with another of Dr. Stafford’s supporters, “In all respects, [Laura Stafford] merits the recognition that the Brommel Award applauds.”
Charles H. Woolbert Research Award
For their article “The parasocial contact hypothesis,” published in Communication Monographs, 72 (2005), 95-118.
Schiappa, Gregg and Hewes were among the first to adapt the original contact hypothesis to forms of “indirect” contact. What in the late 1990s was a literature primarily concerned with face-to-face interaction has become significantly richer as a result of considering media, new media, “imagined” contact, and other unconventional forms of contact (e.g., “friend-of-a-friend” types of intergroup interaction). The authors have an impressive citation record; the article has been cited in Science, along with numerous journals and books in communication, social psychology, sociology, medicine, linguistics, political science, and numerous specialty areas such as tourism studies and studies in sexuality.
Diamond Anniversary Book Award
For her book, Sexting Panic: Rethinking Criminalization, Privacy, and Consent (University of Illinois Press)
Sexting Panic is the rare book that advances scholarly conversations while also promising to enrich family conversations around the dinner table. Amy Adele Hasinoff offers a timely, practical, and comprehensive analysis of the social understandings that spawned the current wave of public anxiety and legal backlash over youth sexting. Challenging the prevailing views that young women are inevitably victims of sexting and that new media practices warrant moral panic, Dr. Hasinoff instead offers a more nuanced view of young women and men as active producers. Informed primarily by cultural studies and feminist theory, her treatment of consent and agency lays the groundwork for more sophisticated, realistic discussions of the ethics of privacy and digital technology. Rather than criminalizing communication practices based on topic and medium, she concludes that parents and policy-makers should distinguish consensual from malicious sharing of content. Well-researched and engaging, Dr. Hasinoff’s book demonstrates the value of communication scholarship to educators, policy-makers, and technology users of all ages and genders. Already reviewed in eight interdisciplinary journals and the subject of dozens of public media stories, Sexting Panic also exemplifies this year’s NCA convention theme of “Communication’s Civic Callings.”
Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award
For her essay, “Biopower and Disciplining Bodies in the Wake of an 'Obesity Epidemic': A Poststructural Feminist Analysis of the Soda Ban”
The Cushman Memorial Award recognizes the top-ranked student-authored paper from all NCA units that competitively rank papers for programming at the NCA Annual Convention. Ms. Ivancic’s essay was well organized, well-conceived, conceptually fascinating and sound, and, of course, well written. Starting with a clear framework for analysis, this essay provided a strong discussion of background literature/research on poststructural feminism and biopower. A combination of exemplary writing and the timely, culturally important interrogation of discourses of power as they are used to discipline and control bodies ultimately led to this essay emerging as the clear winner of the Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award. Aside from it being a pleasure to read, it reflects a rapidly developing area of scholarship in the field of communication.
Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award
Leah Ceccarelli is a distinguished rhetorical critic and theorist whose foundational work on the nature of polysemy and the rhetoric of science has had great influence. Her book, Shaping Science with Rhetoric, won the Rhetoric Society of America’s book award and her essay “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism,” which was published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1999, was recognized with a NCA Golden Anniversary Award. Her most recent book, On the Frontiers of Science, won the Public Address Division’s Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award in 2014. Ceccarelli has also been recognized by the American Forensics Association for her research. Her two academic books and more than 25 articles and book chapters, which exemplify how a critic and theorist can build important and nuanced arguments, but express them in a clear and accessible style, have in the words of one nominator been quite “consequential for the rhetoric of science and the entire field of rhetoric” and make her a worthy recipient of the Ehninger Award.
Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression
For her article, “Press Exceptionalism,” published in the Harvard Law Review, 127, (2014): 2434-2463.
Freedom of expression, even within the confines of Constitutional construction, includes more than freedom of speech; it also includes freedom of the press. Sonja R. West’s important article, “Press Exceptionalism,” makes the case for recognition of the special needs (and hence special exceptions) of the press in American democracy. West argues that “those who fulfill the unique constitutional functions of the press” (e.g. “gathering newsworthy information, disseminating it to the public, and serving as a check on the government and powerful people”) should be recognized in Constitutional interpretation as having special needs that flow from these unique functions. She writes, “We must recognize these [press] speakers in order to consider and potentially protect their specific needs. A continuing refusal to do so, moreover, comes with risks. These risks include not only a failure to fulfill the promises of the First Amendment, but also widespread societal costs arising out of reduced information flow and weakened government scrutiny.” Arguing for a four-prong test of functionality to differentiate “press” from “non-press,” West points a way toward revitalization of the “Press Clause” of the First Amendment that could maximize the press’s freedom of expression by better assuring its ability to fulfill its unique functions.
Gerald M. Phillips Award for Distinguished Applied Communication Scholarship
The Gerald M. Phillips award is presented to NCA members who have dedicated a significant part of their career to seeking important answers to real problems. This year’s honoree continues this tradition. Kevin Barge was selected based on his well-established line of applied research. Dr. Barge is viewed as a leading scholar in the area of organizational communication. The committee noted his excellent work related to leadership, dialogue, organizations and emergencies. He has stressed the importance of practical theory that can be applied to different contexts and phenomena. Practical answers, derived from rigorous research, form the basis of theory development, and refined theory informs the discovery of solutions to new problems. Dr. Barge’s work reinforces this cycle, and thus is the embodiment of applied research.
Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Awards
“The Mediated Veteran: How News Sources Narrate the Pain and Potential of Returning Soldiers.”
Dissertation completed at University of Texas-Austin
Advisor: Joshua Gunn
Dr. Rhidenour’s dissertation highlights the efficacy of narrative in approaching PTSD and honoring the lived experiences of our returning veterans. More specifically, it offers new vistas for exploring how narrative discourse and rhetoric enhance therapeutic approaches in health care. This dissertation argues that too often the stories of veterans are lost, unnoticed, and unrealized. A dissertation of this caliber seamlessly integrates the social scientific concerns of health care with the cultural prowess of reading texts in nuanced ways. Inquiries of public policy, representation of identity in the social media milieu, and a mixed-methods approach, craftily weave rhetorical criticism with content analysis. This kind of methodological approach provides an appreciation and insight into both—forming a deeper, nuanced interpretation of media’s role in valuing the act of returning and the re-entry period for veterans as that happens through mediated channels of discourse.
“Uncertainty and Information Management: A Meta-Analytic Review of Uncertainty’s Effects on Information Management in Illness Contexts”
Dissertation completed at Purdue University
Advisor: Steven R. Wilson
Dr. Kuang’s dissertation involves a meta-analysis of 48 studies considering the relationship between information management and uncertainty within the context of the diagnosis of an illness. The meta-analysis relies on underlying communication theories (primarily-Uncertainty Reduction, Motivated Information Management) as a source of predictions. The results indicate that increases in uncertainty led to less information seeking and increased information avoidance. The results are important for the contribution to both theory and practice. The settling of a question about how information uncertainty influences the desire for additional information represents a fundamental communication question. The implications for the practices of health communication regarding the diagnosis of a disease provide the potential for patient-centered communication.
“Syntaxing the Nation: Temporality and Rhetoric in Contemporary U.S. Political Culture”
Dissertation completed at University of Georgia
Advisor: Barbara Biesecker
Dr. Pierce’s dissertation displayed fine writing, cogent analysis, and theoretical insight. Tightly focused on a single moment in political history, this dissertation contributes to important conversations in critical cultural studies, rhetorical theory, and rhetorical criticism. Dr. Pierce roots the cases in a specific moment of national crisis, connecting ‘the people’ to ‘the nation’ in economic, political, and cultural terms. Using a set of cases (TARP; the debate over the Ground Zero Mosque, and the ‘non-political’ rallies sponsored by Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart), the project advances the ideas that understanding political identity requires both focusing on intense debates and taking seriously the language through which those debates are conducted. This work thus illuminates the ways in which the collective ethos of ‘the people’ can be understood as a linguistic artifact.
Golden Anniversary Monograph Award
“The Health Belief Model as an Explanatory Framework in Communication Research: Exploring Parallel, Serial, and Moderated Mediation,” published in Health Communication, 30:6, 566-576.
This article is highly deserving of the Golden Anniversary Award because it (a) it engages a central theoretical question at the heart of the most prominent health behavior theory of the last 50 years, (b) it utilizes a rigorous design that included data collection across seven sites, (c) it required two years of work to develop, initiative, and complete the evaluation, (d) it utilizes a challenging analytical approach to investigate competing theoretical ideas, and (e) it generates significant attention from scholars inside and outside of communication.
Health Communication reports that this article has been viewed 773 times since June 2015. More importantly, this article has sparked increased attention to the topic of variable ordering with the model, and inspired other labs to begin investigating this issue.This pioneering communication-based monograph is an exemplary piece of what the communication discipline has to offer in taking an evidence-based theoretical approach to translating research into application and making a mark on the discipline at large.
James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address
Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression (University of Illinois Press)
Making Photography Matter is an engaging monograph that investigates how consumers of photography in the late 19th and the early 20th century negotiated emergent national “anxieties and crises of U.S. public life.” Dr. Finnegan details the ways encounters with photography provided a rhetorical repertoire for citizens to contemplate and debate controversial issues of the day that included war, empire, national identity, child labor, and economic depression. Her archive is extensive and her close readings of materials are as provocative as they are insightful. Written in a style that is both fluid and captivating, Making Photography Matter offers a major contribution to the study of rhetoric and to the discipline of Communication.
James L. Golden Outstanding Student Essay in Rhetoric Award
“‘This is Not a Legal Proceeding:’ Deconstructing the New Title IX"
Samantha Grainger Shuba’s paper addresses a widespread and compelling challenge in higher education – Title IX as a response to sexual assault. Ms. Grainger Shuba’s paper analyzes the administrative language of Title IX and shows how it relies upon legalistic discourse, thereby suggesting that Title IX policies and adjudications provide a fair system that delivers justice. She notes that these policies, however, have none of the authority of the law. Drawing upon feminist deconstruction, the author concludes that collegiate adjudication of sexual assault functionally decriminalizes rape instead of offering a just means of redress. This year’s judges were particularly impressed with the sophistication of Ms. Grainger Shuba’s analysis, the theoretical grounding of her paper, and the timely significance of her topic.
Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award
Dr. Erin J. Rand is honored for her project on dissenting opinions in the U.S. Supreme Court related to cases involving gender and sexualities. Dr. Rand’s project is both timely (especially given recent cases such as Windsor, Hobby Lobby, Obergefell, etc.) and responsibly rooted in classic examples such as Lawrence v. Texas and Bowers v. Hardwick. Combining social change theory with top-down, institutional logics of resistance, Dr. Rand’s project promises to complicate the ways we view rhetorics of agitation and control. Concomitantly this project both connects heuristically to scholarly work in legal rhetoric and judicial activism and offers practical applications for jurisprudential resistance.
Leslie Irene Coger Award for Distinguished Performance
Since her dissertation work at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Dr. Lockford has produced an accomplished body of performance work from the page to the stage. Her work is firmly grounded in performance and feminist theory, examined and embodied through her disciplined artistry as a performer, writer, director, and qualitative researcher. Her published scholarship includes over twenty essays and book chapters, as well as her 2004 book Performing Femininity: Rewriting Gender Identity. As an actor, she has taken on leading roles in Mother Courage and Her Children and Wit. Her directorial accomplishments include Stephenson’s The Memory of Water, Silver’s Raised in Captivity, and McCauley’s Sally’s Rape. Alongside her work as an actor and director, her solo performances present a complex body of exploratory work into themes of gender and sexuality. Her intellectual and aesthetic imprint on the study of communication and identity through solo performance in the field of performance studies is pronounced. Her poetic and courageous voice has shaped and moved students, audiences, and her colleagues across the country. Highlights of her original works include 2004’s inhabit/us and most recently, 2012’s Lost Lines. This full length solo production enlists autoethnography, archival research, and Dr. Lockford’s powerful writing craft to produce a performance work that exemplifies the brave, bold, reflexive, and inspirational craft that has made Dr. Lockford a prominent scholar and artistic leader in performance studies for almost two decades.
Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies
The 2016 Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies recognizes Amber Johnson’s superlative recent work, published in Text and Performance Quarterly, Critical Studies in Media and Communication, and Qualitative Inquiry, that pushes methodological and theoretical boundaries to provide insight into performances of intersectional identity. Her essay “Antoine Dodson and the (Mis)Appropriation of the Homo Coon: An Intersectional Approach to the Performative Possibilities of Social Media” illuminates the ways Dodson used social media to complicate racial and gender binaries to create spaces for multiple salient identities. In “Confessions of a Video Vixen: My Autocritography of Sexuality, Desire and Memory,” Johnson relates her short-lived career as a video vixen to explore via the intersectional properties of experience, counter-memory and re-membering how bodies move between and beyond boundaries established by language. In “The Face of Civility: Engaging Critical Pedagogy through Hypermodality,” Johnson introduces a website she built to showcase hypermodal, critical performance pedagogy as scholarship. These ground-breaking works of scholarship contribute a strong foundation for studying the performative possibilities in social media and serve as an example of how hypermodal, critical performance research can challenge dominant power structures within and outside academia.
Mark L. Knapp Award in Interpersonal Communication
Anita Vangelisti exemplifies an individual who undoubtedly has made significant scholarly contributions to the study of interaction and/or relational processes. Dr. Vangelisti is an exceptional scholar who has consistently undertaken theoretically and methodologically sound research over the course of her illustrious career; this research is topically important, published in high quality outlets, and often includes student co-authors who themselves go on to successful careers in our discipline. Dr. Vangelisti is also a wonderful “ambassador” for the study of interpersonal communication to scholars outside of our discipline, in her work with interdisciplinary societies, and within the larger body of NCA. People who are not interpersonal communication scholars come away from her work or with conversations with her with a much better understanding of what we “do.”
Stephen E. Lucas Debut Publication Award
“Imagine There's No President: The Rhetorical Secret and the Exposure of Valerie Plame,” published in Quarterly Journal of Speech, 101, 354-378.
What makes Atilla Hallsby’s essay so impressive is not only the breadth of texts that the author analyzes in building the argument, but the insight that he provides through that analysis. Dr. Hallsby brings a new understanding to the Valerie Plume affair, as well as the Bush Administration’s quieting of Plame to serve its own interests. More significantly, the essay makes an impressive theoretical contribution to our understanding of secrecy (and the uses of rhetoric more broadly), while leading the reader through a complex argument.
Service Awards
Robert J. Kibler Memorial Award
The spirit of this award involves dedication to excellence, commitment to the profession, concern for others, a vision of what could be, acceptance of diversity, and forthrightness. Over the course of his 45-year career in higher education, Dr. Bill Seiler has demonstrated excellence in each of these areas. Dr. Seiler’s greatest contributions in dedication to excellence, commitment to the profession, and concern for others is in his dedication to student learning. Dr. Seiler has earned a well-deserved national reputation as an expert in the field of instructional communication. Dr. Seiler is regarded as a pioneer and senior scholar to whom others turn for guidance and mentorship. At the undergraduate level, Dr. Seiler inspires students to learn more about communication and pushes them to become better communicators. With communication as the lifeblood of our professional and personal relationships, Dr. Seiler’s dedication to students and innovation both inside and outside the walls of the academy is clear. In addition, Dr. Seiler embodies the criteria of having a vision of what could be. His innovation in the classroom has resulted in a multitude of publications including several textbooks. Dr. Seiler’s dedication to the profession and concern for others is also evidenced by his leadership roles.
Samuel L. Becker Distinguished Service Award
Arthur P. Bochner embodies a balanced and integrated ideal of a service, scholarship, and teaching agenda as well as or better than many others in the discipline. He has lived the spirit he espoused here: “Service won’t get you a lighter teaching load, more recognition, or a higher salary. It won’t buy you time to write more books or articles and it doesn’t conform to the entrepreneurial spirit of individualism…I recommend it to you…[b]ecause service can give you something you probably can’t get in the ‘war zone’ of the university, something closer to the ideals of collaboration, community, and harmony, something akin to the closeness and companionship many of us seek but can’t secure in our lives at the university.” Sam Becker used the positions of service that he held to promote the importance of making our discipline more respected, more visible, and more significant to the public audiences we serve. Dr. Bochner’s service to NCA, to his department, to his university, and to his students has shown how communication can be used to achieve understanding and connection across the gulf of world views that too often separate and threaten our sense of human community. What stands out above all in Dr. Bochner’s numerous achievements is his belief in and love for the discipline of Communication.
Distinguished Scholar Awards
Patrice M. Buzzanell is a University Distinguished Professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University and the Chair and Director of the Susan Butler Center for Leadership Excellence. For over 30 years, she has been a leader in the study of gender, feminist scholarship, and organizational communication and has produced award-winning articles on mentoring, work-life balance, careers, and organizational identity. She has a lifetime of scholarly achievements in human communication and has carved new frontiers for the discipline via her scholarly work. In her prolific career, Professor Buzzanell has produced over 170 publications, including four co-edited books, 65 refereed articles, 81 book chapters, and 30 other publications. Her research has led to seven outstanding article/book awards and 14 top paper awards at national, international, and regional conferences. She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and is the only professor of Communication at Purdue to be named a University Distinguished Professor. For her ground-breaking work in gender, Professor Buzzanell has served as an ambassador for the discipline; she is exceptionally well-known in both national and international circles. And she is nearly unsurpassed as an incredible mentor to graduate students and young scholars. During her career, she has advised 29 doctoral dissertations and 16 masters’ theses; she has also served as an external member of doctoral committees in Copenhagen, Chile, the Philippines, and Trinidad. She supports students’ needs, challenges them to achieve their best, and serves as a role model for conducting rigorous, theoretically-driven scholarship.
“Rhetoric of Traumatic Nationalism in the Ground Zero Mosque Controversy,” published in Quarterly Journal of Speech 100 (2014): 53-80.
Donal Carbaugh has been Professor at the University of Massachusetts since 1995, during which time has taught for short periods at universities around the world, including Oxford University, Griffith University in Australia, Turku University School of Economics and Business and the University of Helsinki in Finland, and the University of Colorado. Since the publication of his first book, Talking American: Cultural Discourses on Donahue, Professor Carbaugh has established himself as a leading culture, discourse, and language scholar and the preeminent scholar of the ethnography of communication within the general Communication discipline, and especially in language and social interaction. The author of five books and the editor of four collections, as well as the author of 90 journal articles and book chapters, Professor Carbaugh has been productive by any count. More important than the sheer number of publications is the way Carbaugh’s work has shaped the discipline, firmly establishing the value of cultural knowing, and illustrating for related disciplines how communication brings a valuable and distinctive approach to exploring important and relevant issues. Since 2007, Professor Carbaugh has developed a new approach to scholarship, “cultural discourse analysis,” which is providing the next generation of communication scholars a framework for addressing important questions about culture, personhood, and communication. Professor Carbaugh has also significantly shaped our profession through his teaching. He has successfully advised 21 doctoral students with four more on the way. These students have assumed faculty positions at universities around the United States and around the world; they include some of the most prominent leaders and rising scholars in the area of language and social interaction.
Professor Jon F. Nussbaum, from The Pennsylvania State University, has actively advanced scholarship in Communication Education, Communication and Aging, Health Communication, and Organizational Communication. Of particular merit in his scholarly activity within these substantive domains have been his ongoing revelations of the respects in which interaction both affects and is affected by relationships as individuals move through different stages in their lifespans. His contributions to these four disciplinary domains appear in 19 books and edited collections, 56 articles in refereed journals and yearbooks both inside and outside the discipline of Communication, 45 book chapters, and over 150 competitively selected papers for presentation at conferences of regional, national, and international professional organizations; 21 of those have received “Top Paper” designation. Professor Nussbaum is a Fulbright Research Scholar Award, a Fellow in the American Psychological Association’s Division of Adult Development and Aging, the recipient of the College of the Liberal Arts at The Pennsylvania State University Class of 1933 Award for Distinction in the Social Sciences, an ICA Fellow, the ICA Fisher Mentoring Award, the ICA Public Policy Research Award, and the Lifespan and Digital Communication Achievement Award from Old Dominion University. A former editor of the Journal of Communication and a former president of the International Communication Association, Professor Nussbaum is a servant and citizen of the discipline. And he has mentored a sizeable number of his own graduate advisees while also serving on numerous advisory and dissertation/thesis committees in a non-chair capacity inside and outside the academic units with which he has been affiliated. Professor Nussbaum routinely teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses and has recently been recognized for his contributions in undergraduate education by being named to the roster of Distinguished Honors Faculty in the Schreyer Honors College at The Pennsylvania State University.
Professor Sandi Smith is the Director of the Health and Risk Communication Center and Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. She is a leading scholar in health and interpersonal communication, especially in focusing on how messages and social norms influence health behaviors. Her scholarly contributions span disciplines, promote the integration of knowledge across the field, and have garnered an impressive amount of external funding. Over 30 years, Professor Smith has produced more than 120 publications, including an award-winning edited volume, 15 book chapters, and 88 refereed journal articles. These publications appear in the discipline’s top journals as well as in important patient-oriented medical journals. Professor Smith grounds her work in critical social problems, including alcohol consumption, breast cancer screening, organ donations, and HIV vaccinations. Perhaps more than any other scholar, she has skillfully and successfully integrated interpersonal communication, persuasion, and media effects. Professor Smith has garnered over $9.5 million dollars in external funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Cancer Institute, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among others. In 2016, she was appointed to serve on the funding panel for Communication and Dissemination of Patient-Centered Outcomes that will award $3.5 billion dollars in grants based on the Affordable Care Act; she is the only communication scholar serving on this prestigious panel. An ICA Fellow, and a Distinguished Faculty Award recipient at Michigan State, Professor Sandi Smith has indeed done it all. She has an outstanding record of scholarly contributions, an impressive amount of external funding, recognition and prestigious awards, and an exceptional record of mentoring graduate students.