Doctoral Recipient
Buffalo/Niagara, New York Area
Attained Ph.D. May 2021Areas of focus: Audience Engagement, Persuasion, Behavior Change, Narrative Effects, Entertainment Media Effects, Nonverbal CommunicationCrafted persuasive messages to build engagement and shape beliefs, attitudes, behavior, and intentions.Led research and publications incorporating both qualitative and quantitative methods (including questionnaire and survey design, experiments, text analysis, coding for themes). Responsible for taking research from initial questions and literature review through design, recruitment, analysis, publication, and presentation.Dissertation: "You Want to Be in Love in a Movie: Examining the Content, Industry, and Effects of Romantic Comedy."• Examined how the romantic comedy genre's content has changed over time• Analyzed how content changes relate to industry success (critic and audience reviews, theatrical screenings, box office earnings, awards)• Explored how the genre's messages shape audiences' romantic beliefs• Wrote a persuasive article to counteract the genre's romantic belief effects• Tools: text analysis, unsupervised machine learning, qualitative coding for themes, survey and experimental design, analysis in R (correlation, regression, ANOVA)Awards and Service• Received full-ride Ph.D. funding (2017-2021)• Recipient of the Communication Science Research Award, PhD (2020-2021)• President of the Communication Graduate Student Association (2018-2019)Research and Teaching• Researcher, Narrative Persuasion Lab. 2017-2021.• Research Assistant, Spencer Foundation Grant. Fall 2019 and Summer 2021.• Instructor for Communication in Organizations (COM217). 2019-2021.• Teaching Assistant for Communication in Organizations (COM217). Fall 2018.• Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Communication (COM101). 2017-2018.