Dear Colleagues, As we reflect on 2025, one thing is clear: this has been a year of extraordinary momentum for research at the University of Utah. The Office of the Associate Vice President for Research (AVPR) has been busy—strategizing, launching, convening, supporting, and advocating—always with a single goal in mind: strengthening and sustaining our research…
HCAT routinely presents papers at the International Communication Association (ICA). At ICA 2026, we will be honored with a Top Paper in the Health Communication Division. Led by Chelsea Ratcliff, the manuscript introduces a new model for understanding the communication of uncertainty. Ratcliff, C. L., Lillie, H. M., Wicke, R., & Jensen, J. D. (2026,…
HCAT lab has developed a series of visuals to help people identify acral lentiginous melanoma (ALM) – a rare form of skin cancer. Limited patient materials exist to help people identify this deadly form of cancer. You can see our ALM materials here.
Today, I’m pleased to share the VPR Strategic Plan, which you can explore here: https://strategy.research.utah.edu/ This plan is designed to position the University of Utah for the next decade of discovery—building on our extraordinary strengths while investing in the emerging areas that will shape the future of science, engineering, medicine, and the humanities. Research at…
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a key funder of health research both nationally and in the state of Utah.As AVPR, I wanted to highlight seven ways that NIH funding impacts the world and significantly benefits Utahns.To that end, I created both an infographic and a website highlighting the impact of NIH funding. Those materials were also used…
One of the best ways to identify melanoma is using the ugly duckling sign (UDS) technique. The UDS technique teaches patients to look for the “ugly duckling” – a mole that is atypical for the patient. You can see HCAT Lab’s new UDS brochure and pamphlet here.
HCAT Lab develops innovative materials to help patients identify melanoma, including patient brochures, pamphlets, and videos. We recently completed a series of studies that yielded new materials to teach patients how to identify melanoma using the ABCDE technique. You can read more about the materials, and download them here.
Science spotlights a small number of studies each month that are published in other journals. HCAT Lab was excited to learn that our preprint research, published in Public Understanding of Science, was featured in the November 2024 issue of Science. What is a ‘preprint,’ anyway? Only about one-third of U.S. survey respondents correctly described preprint…
Dr. Dallin Adams has joined the faculty at Sam Houston State University. Dr. Adams will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mass Communication. Dr. Adams led HCAT lab’s biophys research program during his time at the University of Utah, and was an award winning teacher in the strategic communication sequence. His laughter and…
Dr. Helen Lillie has joined the faculty at the University of Iowa. Dr. Lillie will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies. It was such a pleasure having Dr. Lillie in HCAT lab. She led the lab through the pandemic and drove us to new levels of productivity and impact. Congratulations, Dr.…
I will be teaching COMM 3690: Making Brands Stick for Spring 2022. The course is online and open to all University of Utah students. I set the seat cap at 130. Grab a seat before they are gone! Here is a flyer for the course: COMM 3690: Making Brands Stick And here is the syllabus:…
I will be teaching COMM 3580: Strategic Communication & Pandemics for Fall 2021. The course is online and open to all University of Utah students. I set the seat cap at 200. Grab a seat before they are gone! Here is a flyer for the course: And here is the syllabus: If you have any…
I am currently the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Humanities at the University of Utah. I have held that position for 6 years, and it has been very rewarding. Below, I articulate a battle plan for pursuing funding in the Humanities. Notably, this is a battle plan for scholars working in the…
Dr. Helen Lillie is an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in HCAT Lab, and she has been publishing up a storm. Her primary research program focuses on communication and emotion. Helen has published lead-authored articles in Psychology & Health, Journal of Family Communication, and a book chapter in Communicating Science in Times of Crisis: Coronavirus. All of…
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…
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 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…
After two years as a postdoctoral fellow in HCAT lab, Sean Upshaw will join the faculty in the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. Sean will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising at Moody beginning July 2020!
HCAT lab received some great news in January: a paper we submitted to the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) conference will receive a top paper award. Specifically, our paper, “Who is more vulnerable to visual manipulation?: Traits and individual differences related to the visual manipulation test,” was named the 1st Place Winner in the Research Division Paper open…
Chelsea Ratcliff will join the faculty at the University of Georgia. She will be an Assistant Professor in the Grady College of Communication and Journalism beginning July 2020!
Several years ago, HCAT published an article focused on cancer information overload (CIO). In that article, we proposed a measure for the construct, examined psychometric properties, and compared it to Powe’s measure of cancer fatalism. As a follow-up, we recently published another article examining a refined version of the CIO scale. Both articles can be…
HCAT lab is excited to announce that Manusheela Pokharel accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Health Communication in the Department of Communication at Texas State University. Congrats Manu!
In Summer 2019, HCAT lab collected 7 new datasets. Rachael Katz was working on a new CIO dataset for her MA project. Helen Lillie launched the third study in the melanoma death narratives research program. Sean Upshaw developed stimuli to help underserved populations identity a rare form of melanoma (ALM). Liz Giorgi and Julia Berger…
Helen Lillie completed her Ph.D. in May 2019 at the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University. She joined HCAT lab as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow shortly thereafter. Welcome Helen!
For most of the 2018-2019 school year, HCAT lab was busy training. We had several new lab members and that equates to lots of time learning to use the ultraviolet (UV) camera and the biophysiological equipment. Manu was in charge of all that training, and we kept her moving around the clock. As the training…
With the NCA submission deadline looming, HCAT lab decided to have a day retreat in the new Gardiner Commons building. What a great building! We arrived at 9 am and wrote until 5 pm. I’m always surprised at how much we get done in a single day devoted to writing. This will be the first…
Once again, HCAT lab hit Sundance Film Festival hard. We had tickets to five different opening night shows and went to films every day of the festival. The photos tell the story.
Manu published the first article from her dissertation in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine. The article compared the persuasive impact of five types of skin cancer visuals, including ultraviolet photos. She found that ultraviolet photos increase fear, relative to other skin cancer visuals, and that fear mediates the pathway between exposure to ultraviolet photos and…
The 2018 HCAT Writing Retreat was held in Adobe House (for the second year in a row). Dr. Strange Jensen appeared to introduce the retreat. Find out more here.
One of the perks of being from a state with very few people (re: I am originally from Montana) is that you sometimes get handwritten congratulation notes from the Governor. It was wonderful to receive this in the mail.
We’ve been working on a new logo for the HCAT lab. Here’s the winner (as a jpeg; pngs below):
Here are some alternative (jpeg) versions:
And here are the vector versions (you can resize these without losing sharpness, and they have a transparent background):
We have developed a high performance, monochrome UV camera to advance research in dermatology, public health, and (interestingly enough) the documentation and discovery of historical artifacts. HCAT lab is working with several faculty on the latter initiative, including Professor Rory Becker from Eastern Oregon University. We recently used the camera to photograph specimens at the Utah Museum of Natural History, including scorpions (who glow when exposed to UV)! Rory has also used our UV camera to photograph Neanderthal caves in Croatia (photos to come).
HCAT lab held another writing retreat October 11th – 14th, 2013 in Park City, UT. The writing retreat was held at a 5 bedroom cabin in Deer Valley that described itself as the Nordic House (you can rent it here). Eleven faculty and graduate students attended the retreat. I led a workshop on Lisrel and confirmatory factory analysis, Lisa Guntzviller led a workshop on bibliography software, and Rob Yale took us all out to dinner at the Blue Iguana (which would become a writing retreat tradition). We also discovered numerous quirks such as my love of high quality scrap paper and Kevin Coe’s need to have lots of gum on hand while writing. Finally, Rob Yale impressed everyone (as he tends to) with an amazing suitcase.
We worked on 12 manuscripts during the writing retreat, 7 of which were finished by end. We played an excessive amount of shuffleboard.
In 2008, I journeyed to China as part of a delegation from Purdue University. We attended a Health Communication conference, met with several universities, and traveled. Fun Fact: I was a Political Science and East Asian Studies major in college. The latter focused on Chinese history, culture, and language.
