Education and professional background

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This academic year marks my fourth as an Assistant Professor within Bradley University's Department of Communication. I am thrilled to be a Bradley Brave, and I am looking forward to a new semester teaching public relations, social media, and health communication courses. 
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As a researcher, my focus is on health communication; more specifically, the effects of different types of media portrayals of mental illness on the audience. My dissertation, "Beyond stigma: Developing and testing a scale of perceived trivialization of mental illness," created a measure of trivialization and then empirically tested it in an experimental design. I have continued to expand upon this program of research while at Bradley.

Prior to earning my doctorate from Indiana University's Media School, I received my B.A. in journalism from Ohio Northern University, where my focus was on news writing and graphic design. I served as an editor and reporter for the campus newspaper and worked as a general assignment reporter with The Lima News and The Ada Herald. I earned my M.A. in journalism from the University of Memphis where I also worked in the advertising production office of the student-run newspaper and as a teaching assistant on campus, alongside a corporate communications internship. After my master’s, I worked as the marketing and social media communications manager at an insurance company in Northeastern Ohio.

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