Awards

Top Paper at NCA 2021

HCAT presented multiple papers at NCA 2021, including a Top Paper in the Health Communication Division. Led by Manu Pokharel, the manuscript reported the results of biophysiological research of UV imagery. Pokharel, M., Jensen, J. D., John, K. K., Christy, K. R., Taylor-Burton, S., & Upshaw, S. (2021, November). Visual communication and skin cancer prevention:…

Helen honored with Susan Cooper Jones Endowed Fellowship in Cancer Research

Helen Lillie was awarded the prestigious Susan Cooper Jones Endowed Fellowship in Cancer Research. This award honors an outstanding fellow, PhD, MD or MD/PhD, who has performed exceptional cancer-focused research during their training at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. The award is made possible by the generosity of the family of Susan Cooper Jones, a young mother who lost…

HCAT wins Utah Grand Challenge Grant

HCAT just won a Utah Grand Challenge grant. This mechanism provides funding for cancer researchers to address pressing cancer issues facing the state of Utah (and beyond). Utah leads the nation in Melanoma incidence (in a bad way). Given that, our project will develop and test and innovative approaches to melanoma detection in coordination with…

Manu wins Miller Dissertation Award

Manusheela “Manu” Pokharel (Ph.D., 2019) was recently awarded the Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the National Communication Association. Pokharel received her doctorate in communication in May 2019 from the University of Utah and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Texas State University. The Gerald R. Miller award…

Courtney win Early Career Scholar Award from HCD

Courtney Lynam Scherr will receive the Early Career Scholar Award from the Health Communication Division of NCA in November 2020. We are so proud of Courtney! This award celebrates early career researchers with exceptional productivity and programs. Her research on communication and genetics is outstanding, and a great representation of what health communication researchers do.…

NIH R01 to study Personalized Messaging

Led by Yelena Wu, we recently won an NIH R01 grant to support a 5 year health intervention targeting sun safe behavior in Utah adolescents. The goal of the grant is to evaluate a multi-school intervention designed to decrease skin cancer. The study will run from 2020 through 2025. The intervention includes multiple components including…

HCAT wins COVID seed grant

HCAT won funding from the Immunology, Inflammation, and Infectious Disease Initiative (i3) at the University of Utah. The funding provides support for a repeated, cross sectional study that will track perceptions of COVID communication across 18 weeks. Notably, we are interested in whether people felt COVID messages were exaggerated. HCAT members Andy J. King (Iowa…

Sean Upshaw joins HCAT as a Postdoc

  Dr. Sean Upshaw recently joined HCAT lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow after completing his PhD at Howard University in health communication. Sean has a background in graphic design and illustration with a BPS in Biomedical Illustration from the University of Memphis. As an HCAT Postdoctoral Fellow, Sean will work on designing and evaluating innovative…

Best Article in Risk Analysis

We just found out our 2017 publication in Risk Analysis was selected as a best article by the editors. The article is: Jensen, J. D., Pokharel, M., Scherr, C. L., King, A. J., Brown, N., & Jones, C. (2017). Communicating uncertainty to the public: How amount and source of uncertainty impact fatalism, backlash, and overload.…

Montana State Champs – 20 years later

Approximately 20 years ago, I had the pleasure of participating in Montana High School Speech & Drama. I competed in Humorous Duo Acting with my good friend, Rusty Limesand. He had a great sense of humor, and an amazing threshold for physical pain (which came in handy given our love of vaudevillian comedy).

My senior year, we were lucky enough to win the state title in Humorous Duo Acting, and to take home the team state championship in Drama.

After high school, Rusty became a prison guard, and a cell extractor (they guy who removes unruly prisoners from their cells).

I went to college and won a national championship in collegiate speech and drama, before continuing forward for my Ph.D.

We were an odd pair in many ways. He was a jokester, who loved big, physical comedy. I was more cerebral, and liked writing more than anything else. I always wrote our routines, an approach that would put me against the grain in college speech and drama (where it is rare for people to write their own material).

Sadly, Rusty passed away in 2011 (in a bizarre turn, his story was part of an episode of Dateline NBC). But I still have lots of great memories of him, humorous duo, and our time together. Thinking back on it, 20 years later, it seems like another life.

RustyandJakeFB_IMG_1463364913711FB_IMG_1463364367204FB_IMG_1463364357911

 

HCAT at BEA in Las Vegas

Mindy Krakow and I traveled to BEA this year to present research and receive a few awards. Mindy received an award for her dissertation (congrats Mindy!) and we won a top paper in the research division (congrats us!). We also enjoyed stopping by NAB and learning more about VR equipment. Nokia was there, so it was a great opportunity to chat with them about our new camera.

Plus we went to two great shows: La Reve and Ka.

8948 8949 8950 8952

 

 

HCAT lab wins Golden Monograph

The Golden Anniversary Monograph Awards were created to mark NCA’s 50th Anniversary in 1964. Originally, there were awards given to monographs and to books. The book award was deleted and later reinstated as the Diamond Anniversary Book Award. The Golden Anniversary Monograph Awards are presented to the most outstanding scholarly monograph(s) published during the previous calendar year.

My randomized controlled trial published in Social Science & Medicine was honored with the 2015 Golden Anniversary Monograph Award from NCA. You can read more about it here. You can see a list of past award winners here.

img950959.jpg

Distinguished Article in Health Communication

Dan O’Keefe and I received the Distinguished Article/Book Chapter in Health Communication from NCA’s Health Communication Division. The award was for our meta-analysis of loss/gain framing research. That project took several years to complete, and yielded multiple publications, but our analysis in Journal of Health Communication seemed to have the biggest impact. I learned a…