Officers

Head 

Lauren Feldman is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Broadly, her research focuses on the effects of news and political media on political knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Her current research analyzes media coverage of climate change and its influence on public opinion and engagement. Her research interests also include the intersection of news and entertainment, and how less-traditional sources of political information – like political satire and partisan media – affect public opinion and engagement around policy issues.Email: lauren.feldman@rutgers.edu  

Vice Head & Program Chair

Emily Vraga is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at George Mason University. Her research focuses on how individual predispositions and motivations influence the processing of media content in the evolving digital environment, with special emphasis on understanding how political identity constrains individuals' response to partisan messages and news content. For more information on her research and teaching interests, please visit her website.
Email: ekvraga@gmail.com


Research Chairs

Jasun Carr is an Assistant Professor at Idaho State University, and earned his PhD in Mass Communication from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His current research projects focus on the impact of the Third-Person Effect and the Influence of Presumed Influence on persuasion, consumer culture, and civic engagement; and the interaction of product placements, consumer culture, and peer groups. For more information, please visit www.djcarr.net.
Email: carrd@susqu.edu






Amy Bree Becker is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore, Maryland. Her research areas include public opinion and citizen participation on controversial political issues, the political effects of exposure and attention to hybrid media, especially political comedy and entertainment, new media and computational research methods, and science communication. 

Email: abbecker@loyola.edu

Teaching Chair

Bryan McLaughlin is an assistant professor of advertising in the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University. His research focuses on the interplay of social identity with strategic and interpersonal communication in political and health contexts. His current research explores the strategic use of social identity cues (i.e. partisan, religious, racial) by American politicians and the effect these cues have on political processes, such as voting behavior and political polarization.
Email: bryan.mclaughlin@ttu.edu

         
PF&R Chair

Heather LaMarre is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Communication at Temple University. Dr. LaMarre’s research generally focuses on the persuasive influence of policy and issue narratives on individual attitudes, public opinion, and policy related outcomes. With a special interest in the processing and effects of narrative-based strategic messaging in entertainment and emergent media, Professor LaMarre’s work has been applied across multiple strategic communication contexts including political communication, policy communication, political public relations, and corporate issue advocacy.

Email: heather.lamarre@temple.edu 

Graduate Student Liaison

Ben Lyons is a PhD student at Southern Illinois University in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts. His research examines the effects of digital media on political communication and public opinion, with a focus on contested beliefs and misinformation. Among other things, he looks at the influence of social identities on these beliefs, factors affecting correction success, and the role of network heterogeneity in responses to misinformation online. He is currently managing editor for Gateway Journalism Review.

Email: lyonsb@siu.edu 

Communication Officers

Rachel Mourao is a third-year doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests involve social movements, social media, political communication, and gender. In 2014, she was awarded the McCombs publishing award, the Mary Gardner Graduate Student Research Award, as well as a Decentralized Continuing Fellowship from the Moody School of Communication. She holds an M.A. in Latin American Studies and International Communication from the University of Florida.  For more information, please visit her website.
Email: rachelmourao@gmail.com



Shannon McGregor is a second-year doctoral student and the 2014-2015 Jesse H. Jones Fellow for the School of Journalism. Her research interests center on political communication, digital media, gender, and public opinion. Her work involves using large corpuses of social media data to understand how political actors, the media, and the public navigate political events in socially networked digital spaces. At the 2014 AEJMC annual conference, she was awarded the Mary Gardner Graduate Student Research Award. She serves as the student leader for Dr. Regina Lawrence’s Twitter Research Group (TwRG) at UT. 
Twitter: @shannimcg
Email: shannon.c.mcgregor@gmail.com

Membership Chair

Pei Cindy Zheng is currently a third-year Ph.D. student at the School of Journalism, The University of Texas at Austin. She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with an Mphil degree in Communication in 2012, and from the Tsinghua University in Beijing with a B.A. degree in Journalism in 2010. Her research interests lay in political communication and new media technology, and she has presented several papers at the International Communication Association (ICA) and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) annual conferences since 2011. Pei teaches multimedia skills classes at the UT. Before that, she was a reporter at Xinhua News Agency in Beijing and she has worked in the public relation department in a Hong Kong company.

Email: pei.cindy.zheng@gmail.com

Heads emeritus

Erick Nisbet is an assistant professor with assistant professor the School of Communication at the Ohio State University.  His research is in comparative political communication and the media psychology of international relations, combining theory and research from the fields of communication and political science.    

 

Guy Golan is the founder and former head of the Political Communication Interest Group of AEJMC. He is an associate professor of public relations and public diplomacy at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. His research focuses on international political communications and public diplomacy. 

Tom Johnson, Digital Media Research Program Director, is the Amon G. Carter Jr. Centennial Professor in the School of Journalism.  His research has focused on the uses and effects of new media in politics. Recent works have explored the credibility and uses of social media as well as the effects of these media on political attitudes and behaviors. He has authored one book and co-edited four others.  He has published more than 55 articles in academic journals, including Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Journal of Information Technology and Policy, and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.