Six New Faculty Members Welcomed at the Annual Fall Colloquium
Held virtually this year, SC&I formally welcomed the new faculty members joining the school this fall, and the new faculty presented overviews of their research.
85 members of the SC&I community virtually attended the 2020 New Faculty Colloquium, an event held by SC&I at the beginning of every fall semester to provide an opportunity for the school to formally welcome new faculty members, and for the new faculty members to present their research interests to SC&I faculty, staff, and students.
This year SC&I is thrilled and proud to welcome Tawfiq Ammari, Shawnika Hull, Yonaira Rivera, Megan Threats, Maria Venetis, and DaJung (DJ) Woo.
Professors Marie Radford and Lea Stewart, chairs of the Library and Information Science and Communication Departments, respectively, kicked off the colloquium by thanking the new faculty search committees for their excellent work. They then introduced the new faculty members joining their departments, noting their incredible accomplishments and providing a few highlights of their research interests.
Following the new faculty presentations, SC&I Dean Jonathan Potter said, “What a brilliant set of smart, edgy, and exciting scholars. I look forward to the future as this cohort moves through the school. I was really struck, as I’m sure all of us were after listening to these short talks, about the multiple connections between these researchers on a range of different groups, individuals, centers, and grants within our community.”
Following are brief excerpts from the each of the faculty’s presentations, which describe their research interests and the courses they will be teaching this year.
Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science
Ph.D., University of Michigan
Ammari will be focusing on two projects in the near future. One is the adoption of emerging technologies in everyday life, and the other is on technology as a tool for empowerment. For the first project, Ammari is studying emerging technologies such as voice assistance, IOT devices, anything that starts with “Smart,” for example Smart lights or Smart sensors -- technologies that are causing dramatic changes in how people conduct their daily routines. Ammari is studying these technologies through the lenses of universal access, privacy issues, and the use of voice assistance by older adults. For the second project Ammari is examining how technology, specifically social media, can be used to empower marginalized communities.
This semester he is teaching ITI 210, Management of Technological Organizations.
Assistant Professor of Communication
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Hull was not available to participate in this event.
Hull’s research focuses on reducing racial inequities in HIV incidence through community-engaged, applied communication science. In particular, she develops, implements and evaluates theoretically grounded communication interventions focused on impacting individual and social-structural barriers to HIV prevention. This research is informed by, and developed in close collaboration with community partners. Her expertise includes qualitative (i.e. focus groups) and quantitative (i.e. surveys, experiments) data collection and analytical methods. Her research has been funded through various institutional, non-profit (i.e., MAC AIDS Fund) and governmental mechanisms (i.e., NIH, CDC) and published in communication and public health journals. Her rigorous, theoretically grounded, collaborative approach to research informs health communication theorizing and practice.
Assistant Professor of Communication
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health
Rivera’s research agenda overall explores how social media can be used to improve community health. She focuses on the Latino community and underserved communities. Rivera is currently focusing on two areas of overarching work. One, which she focused her dissertation work on, explores how engagement with health information and misinformation on social media can impact health decisions. Her other line of work examines how social media can be used to communicate with and mobilize communities before and after disaster. Rivera is one of the founders of a grassroots organization called Puerto Rico Stands, which she and her co-organizers formed to help provide disaster relief to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Looking ahead, Rivera plans to take some of the practice-based work she has done for Puerto Rico Stands and develop it into theories, community engaged research, and an exploration of resiliency.
She is teaching COM 408 Health Messages and Campaign Design.
Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science
Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Threats' program of research centers on leveraging biomedical, consumer, and patient-oriented informatics to improve the sexual and reproductive health outcomes of sexual and gender minority communities of color. She uses a community-engaged approach to support the development, implementation, and evaluation of culturally-appropriate, theory-informed HIV informatics interventions. Currently, she is partnering with Games for Change to develop a prototype of a video game for sexual minority Black young adults designed to improve linkage and retention in HIV prevention and care, self-efficacy for social support building, and health information evaluation. The video game concept and design is based on the user-design requirements shared by participants in a community-based participatory research study she conducted as principal investigator.
This fall, Threats is teaching Reference Sources and Services.
Associate Professor of Communication
Ph.D. Rutgers School of Communication and Information
Venetis’ research examines both provider-patient communication and patient-close other communication. Recently she has been focusing on the ways patients and close others communicate. As an interpersonal scholar, she grounds her work in interpersonal processes.
One active line of research Venetis is working on includes disclosure to medical providers. She studies how individuals share potentially stigmatizing information, such as sexual orientation and/or gender identity with medical providers. Venetis is also examining how women with gynecologic cancer communicate with an informal support provider such as a spouse or adult child who attends their medical visits with them. Her findings show that patients do not always advocate or speak for themselves during medical interactions, and this effect seems to be exacerbated with patients whose primary language is something other than English. She plans to further examine these efforts at support in this context. She has also been studying is how dyadic partners enact resilience, using the communication theory of resilience to examine how people engage in daily interactions that serve to promote or hinder resilience during times of stress.
This semester she is teaching the undergraduate and master’s level Interpersonal Communication courses. In the spring, she will also instruct Interpersonal Communication Theory at the doctoral level.
Assistant Professor of Communication
Ph.D., University of California Santa Barbara
The first area of Woo’s research is organizational and vocational socialization, specifically examining the role of communication in individuals’ sense of belonging, membership, and expert status within their professional communities and organizations. The second area of Woo’s research focus is on cross boundary collaboration, including interprofessional and interorganizational collaboration. Woo seeks to understand how collaborators negotiate their different interests, knowledge, and identities as they work to achieve their collective goals. Woo has been researching these topics through field research methods. In a recent project, Woo collaborated with a health communication researcher and an emergency physician to do an observational study in a hospital emergency room, exploring how nurses, physicians, and technicians collaborate through what is known as “teaming.” Woo examined communication processes facilitating their interprofessional collaboration in a time-sensitive and fast-changing environment. Woo has also been recently looking at how technology is used in collaborative decision-making, particularly advanced simulation modelling which has become a key topic during the pandemic.
This semester Woo is teaching COM 357, Organizational Communication.
More information about research at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information is on the website.