I am committed to service activities that help my department, university, and field evolve, particularly with the rapidly changing communication media and technology on which I focus my research. As a researcher whose work is often interdisciplinary, I place great value in assuring that our department is at the forefront of both research and education in our field, as well as learning from related fields, such as information science and computer science. I have served on several academic committees over the years, such as the Undergraduate Studies and Graduate Studies committees, in which my work helps develop the curricula and educational opportunities to reflect our students’ and the field’s needs. I have also been involved in departmental events such as open houses, judging the Public Speaking Competition, and discussing my work with the Communication Society. At the university level I recently presented to faculty about effective social media use at the first Social Media Day and provided one-on-one consultations to any UConn individuals in need of social media use advice. I have also served as a reviewer for programs such as the IDEA grant, and presented my work to alumni as part of Alumni College in the past. My service to the field fulfills this same goal as I focus on activities that help drive new areas of research and new forms of distributing this work. I am on the editorial board for the Journal of Media Psychology and have served as a reviewer for over 20 communication and information science journals. This year I joined the social media team for the Communication and Technology (CAT) division of the International Communication Association (ICA), and will be serving as a faculty mentor for their annual doctoral consortium in 2019. For several years I have served as a reviewer, moderator, discussant, and session chair for technology-focused divisions of major communication conferences such as ICA, National Communication Association (NCA), and Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), as well as related computer science and information science conferences such as the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). I continue to take on more involved roles in these conferences, such as serving on the program committee for the International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) for the last two years.

I continue to aim for a student-driven/collaborative learning model of teaching which allows the students’ own experiences to play a greater role in their learning. My teaching style is shaped by three values: Awareness, relevance, and learning by doing. My instruction is most effective when I understand how students learn and interpret new information in the context of their previous knowledge, so I learn from their experiences and relate new information back to them in those contexts. As a media scholar, I rely on current topics of interest as examples so that not only are students more engaged in the topic, but they understand the relevance to their own current media use and interests. Finally, students comprehend the nuances of a particular theory or method much more effectively when they can test it for themselves, so I engage students in their own experiments and self-assessments to further make the concept relevant to their lives. At the graduate level, I aim to advise each student in their education and research toward their individual goals and needs. I work with them to develop the type of skills and experience they need for academic or non-academic careers through independent studies particular to their topics of interest, preparing work for conferences in their areas of study, and coordinating internship and other practical experience that are beneficial to their specific goals. Because I believe these diverse areas of graduate student expertise are valuable to other students, I have also started meeting with my advisees in a weekly lab group setting where they can collaborate on work and get feedback and insight from each other. Since coming to UConn, I have developed two new courses to meet the needs of students and the department: An undergraduate theory/applied social media course (COMM 4640) and a graduate research-focused social media seminar (COMM 5640). Additionally, I am working more toward connecting what students learn to the communities around them. Last year, I was a Service Learning Faculty Fellow through UConn’s Office of Public Engagement, where I worked to convert my undergraduate social media course into a service learning course. As part of this initiative, my students are now working on a social media project with the Connecticut Science Center in Hartford. Continuous learning in teaching is of great importance to me. Since joining UConn I have attended a number of workshops and seminars at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) focused on engaging students in the classroom, responding to their work more effectively, and teaching them to think critically, in additional to practical seminars on assistive learning technologies, and how to incorporate new technology into the classroom. I have attended the Writing Center’s training on Teaching a Writing-Intensive Course to prepare for teaching W courses. I have also had a staff member from CETL observe several of my classes and provide formal feedback for improving courses of various sizes and formats. social media, new communication technologies, mass media effects, computer-mediated communication

My research focuses on the processes and effects of information and content sharing in social media, particularly in terms of news, health, and science communication. My goal over the next 5 to 10 years is to continue to develop a research program that investigates effective news, health, and science communication through social media, and to build meaningfully connections between this work and the public and communities that could benefit from it. This overall goal has three parts. First, I continue to conduct original research on communication technology use in a variety of areas. One main research area has been focused on the engagement in news content through social media, and I will continue to investigate this topic. More recently, I have also focused on how social media can be a beneficial platform for science communication, particularly for scientists to communicate with the public. I am also working to grow my research in the area of social media for health communication in terms of physical, social, and mental health. To this end, I am seeking funding opportunities for each of these endeavors to expand my current studies into broader research programs. Second, I am focused on developing new methods to study these online networks of interest. I am actively collaborating on ideas with other colleagues in the field who are also interested in better studying online technology through increasingly computational methods. I have attended and presented at pre-conferences at international conferences and workshops at other institutions focused on developing the new skills and tools necessary to conduct research on social media platforms, and am part of efforts to further this field. It is my hope to combine my content-focused research with my work on new approaches to conducting this research into a comprehensive program in a way that can both improve our understanding of online communication as well as our understanding of how to conduct research in this space. I also use my teaching to further my skills and practice in this area by teaching new methods of social media data collection and analysis. Finally, I am now working more toward effectively communicating and applying this work to communities outside of academia. One major part of this effort is converting my courses into service learning courses, where students are required to apply what they learn to problems in the community. Most recently, students in my undergraduate social media course are conducting social media research and creating targeted content for the Connecticut Science Center. Another part of this effort is giving talks about social media literacy to non-academic audiences such as at UConn’s Alumni College, the Hartford Public Library, the Institute of Living in Hartford, and Dolan Middle School in Stamford.