Two members of the Rutgers School of Communication and Information faculty have been named among the most prolific scholars within the last five years by the journal Communication Education. Associate Professor Kristina Scharp and Assistant Professor Dajung (DJ) Woo were cited for the number of articles published in four journals considered central to the communication discipline: Journal of Communication, Communication Monographs, Communication Research, and Human Communication Research. These were the “most central” journals because they account for a significant portion of papers published in communication during those years. Woo and Scharp were cited among the top 25 scholars who either wrote without co-authors or who tended to be lead authors within a group of collaborators. Their productivity puts them in the top 10 scholars who were published in the top-four most-central journals.

“This recognition is gratifying, but not surprising,” said Professor Marya L. Doerfel, chair of the SC&I Department of Communication. “We are proud to attract many of the finest scholars in the world to our department. In fact, Rutgers scholarship was evident in the Communication Education article. Rutgers faculty authored about three dozen of the 674 articles in the top four journals and in general are prolific across a variety of journals that appeal to a variety of audiences.”

Woo conducts research about how communication enables collaboration and membership negotiation within and/or between organizations. Her research is inspired by the importance of people learning how to successfully work with people from different backgrounds and cultures. “Working with people who are different from ourselves is more complex than we realize. It’s not just different languages or expertise that complicates our working relationships, but different norms and assumptions about how to communicate work processes,” she explained. Woo’s work has received awards from the National Communication Association, the International Communication Association, and the Academy of Management.

Scharp’s research is centered at the intersection of interpersonal, family, and health communication, especially during times when families face difficult transitions or experience marginalization. Scharp explained that her research exposes the “taken for granted assumptions that marginalize, stigmatize, and disenfranchise groups of people as well as the ways they can resist those assumptions and enact resilience in response.”

Scharp’s research has also been recognized by several prestigious awards, including the 2022 Jack Kay Award for Community Engagement and Applied Communication Scholarship, the International Communication Association’s 2021 Early Career Scholar Award, among several others from the National Communication and the International Communication Associations.

Learn more about the Communication Department at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information on the website.