Department of Communication

Alumni Newsletter

Fall 2013

Professor Drew Margolin joined the Department of Communication as an as-sistant professor this fall. His position was made possible from a generous donation by alumna Peggy Koenig, ’78, that established the Geri Gay Sesqui-centennial Faculty Fellowship in Communication and Technology. Professor Margolin is a graduate of the Annenberg Program at the University of South-ern California and has an undergraduate degree from Yale. He has several years of experience on Wall Street as a VP at a major firm. His areas of exper-tise include social networking and organizational behavior and technology.

The Department Welcomes Drew Margolin

The Department of Communication + Cornell NYC Tech

The Department of Communication is currently conducting a senior search for a faculty member to join Cornell’s NYC Tech Campus and lead the M.S. in Information Systems with a specialization in connective me-dia. Our department is among the first hiring for the NYC Tech Campus and the first in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The position and pro-gram are offered through the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation

Institute. The professor will join a team of highly innovative individuals well estab-lished in the fields of computer science, en-gineering, business, communication, and in-formation science.

Congratulations to Dale Bornstein, ‘85, for recieving the CALS Outstand-ing Alumni Award for 2013. Bornstein received her award at the official ceremony and reception at Cornell on November 11th. Bornstein, who worked for over 27 years at Ketchum Public Relations as a Senior Part-ner and Director of Global Relations, recently accepted a new position as CEO at MBooth, a global communications com-pany in New York. Regarding her move, she not-ed to BusinessWire, “At a time when clients are seeking campaign-leading ideas from any size agency across any discipline, MBooth is perfect-ly poised to capture the imagination of the CMO. The agency is nimble and innovative with a strong reputation for compelling creative that works across integrated platforms.”

Aumni Spotlight

Advisory Board Update

The Department of Communication Advisory Board met on October 15th in Los Angeles to discuss the current and future endeavors of the department. Faculty and staff attending were Geri Gay, Katherine McComas, Sahara Byrne, Jon Schuldt, and Aimee Woodruff. Alumni guests and advisory board mem-bers met at Fox Entertainment Studios, courtesy of advisory board member Kevin Reilly, and discussed current curriculum, research, and teaching devel-opments in the department as well as the ongoing plans for presence at the NYC tech campus and the move to the 4th floor of Mann. Attending board members included Reggie Fils Aime, President of Nintendo America, Janina Pawlowski, CEO of Pescadero Food’s Wattle & Comb, Kevin Reilly, Chairman of Fox Entertainment, Kurt Abrahamson, CEO of ShareThis.com, and Ryan Silbert, Creative Director & Part-ner at Toy Closet Films.

Geri Gay will be stepping down from the position of Department Chair after 10 years of dedicated leadership, mentorship, and service. During her time as chair, Professor Gay continually up-held a commitment to innovation and excellence. She facilitated several new faculty hires, solidified a partner-ship and collaborative spirit between the de-partments of Communication and Infor-mation Science, and led our department as one of the first involved in the Cornell NYC Tech Campus as Chair of the Communication Senior Hire Search Committee. Please join us in commemorating her transformative work in making us a top tier department.

Thank You, Professor Gay!

Congratulations, Professor McComas!

Katherine McComas has accepted the position of Department Chair,

starting January 1, 2014. Please join us in congratulating her and cel-

ebrating the strong leadership she will bring to our department. Pro-

fessor McComas joined the department as an assistant professor in

2003 and has served as the Associate Chair of

the department since July 1, 2013. Throughout

this semester, Professor McComas has played a

lead role in many department initiatives, includ-

ing helping to plan our department’s future

move to its new home on the 4th floor of Mann

Library. We look forward to Professor McComas’

upcoming years of service.

This year, the Department of Communication’s PhD program celebrates its 20th anniversary. Since its inception, the program has attracted high caliber students both nationally and globally, and its reputation as a hub for impactful research has steadily grown. Our graduate program is con-sistently ranked in the top 5 national programs and is unique in its diver-sity of research areas and strong faculty student collaborations. Many of our faculty members routinely co-author papers with students, aiding in their experience of publishing and presenting their research at confer-ences. Graduates of our program are competitive applicants in the job pool after completing their doctorates and go on to be successful mem-bers of academia and industry-related fields.

Quick Facts

Number of current graduate students: 37

Faculty Research Areas: http://communication.cals.cornell.edu/research Director of Graduate Studies: Susan Fussell (sfussell@cornell.edu)

Graduate Program Coordinator: Joanna Alario (jca36@cornell.edu)

Website: http://communication.cals.cornell.edu/graduate-program

PhD Program 20th Anniversary

Niederdeppe, J., Bigman, C., Gonzales, A., & Gollust, S. (2013). Communication about health disparities in the mass media. Journal of Communication, 63, 8-30.

A variety of scholars have explored the role of communication in reducing, maintaining, and even widening health disparities, but comparatively less attention has focused on the content and effects of communication about health disparities in the mass media. This article aims to summarize the current state of knowledge about these issues by identifying key outcomes and audiences for mass-mediated communication about health disparities, describing what is known about public opinion about health disparities, reviewing selected research on the content and ef fects of mass-mediated communication about health disparities, and identifying priorities for future research to better understand the role of communication in shaping public support and collective action to reduce health dis parities.

Gergle, D., Kraut, R. E. & Fussell, S. R. (2013). Using visual information for grounding and awareness in collabora-tive tasks. Human Computer Interaction, 28, 1-39.

When pairs work together on a physical task, seeing a common workspace facilitates communication and benefits performance. When mediating such activities, however, the choice of technology can transform the visual infor mation in ways that impact critical coordination processes. In this article we examine two coordination processes that are impacted by visual information—situation awareness and conversational grounding—which are theoretic cally distinct but often confounded in empirical research. We present three empirical studies that demonstrate how shared visual information supports collaboration through these two distinct routes. We also address how par ticular features of visual information interact with features of the task to influence situation awareness and con versational grounding, and further demonstrate how these features affect conversation and coordination. Experi ment 1 manipulates the immediacy of the visual information and shows that immediate visual feedback facilitates collaboration by improving both situation awareness and conversational grounding. In Experiment 2, by misalign ing the perspective through which the Worker and Helper see the work area we disrupt the ability of visual feed back to support conversational grounding but not situation awareness. The findings demonstrate that visual infor mation supports the central mechanism of conversational grounding. Experiment 3 disrupts the ability of visual feedback to support situation awareness by reducing the size of the common viewing area. The findings suggest that visual information independently supports both situation awareness and conversational grounding. We con clude with a general discussion of the results and their implications for theory development and the future design of collaborative technologies.

McLeod, P. L. (2013) Distributed People and Distributed Information: Vigilant Decision-Making in Virtual Teams.

Small Group Research.

The theoretical framework of vigilant interaction theory is used to examine information exchange and decision-

making quality in virtual teams. Groups completed a hidden profile task in one of three geographic dispersion con-

ditions: all members colocated, isolated, or mixed with two colocated and two isolated members. Vigilant interac-

tion—discussion of task information, attention to other group members’ information, discussion of positive and

negative attributes of the alternatives, and systematic information processing—predicted decision quality. Explicit

reminders of information differences predicted pooling of unique information. No evidence was found for difficul-

ties in interaction and task performance due to subgroup faultline dynamics; instead vigilant interaction was high-

est in groups with mixed distributions, suggesting they exerted compensatory effort. Exploratory analyses suggest-

ed that temporal vigilance was lowest in completely distributed groups. Implications for new dimensions of the

vigilant interaction theory framework are discussed.

Selected Abstracts

Faculty had another productive year publishing research in top tier

journals. Here are selected abstracts from a few.

Rebecca Robbins was quoted in Financial Times article for her re-search on creating corporate culture that values sleep.

Elizabeth Newbury is serving as the Graduate Director of the CALS Alumni Association.

Sunny J Kim passed her B exam this fall and is now working as a Postdoctoral Associate at Dartmouth College.

Stephanie Steinhardt has been accepted the CSCW 2014 Confer-ence for her paper, “Reconciling Rhythms: Plans and Temporal Alignment in Collaborative Scientific Work.”

Selected Graduate Student Spotlights

Selected Graduate Student Publications & Presentations

Lundell, H., Niederdeppe, J. & Clarke, C. (2013). Public views about health causation, at-tributions of responsibility, and inequality. Journal of Health Communication, 18(9), 1116-1130.

Katz, S. J. & Byrne, S. (2013). Construal Level Theory of Mobile Persuasion. Media Psy-chology, 16, 245-271. doi: 10.1080/15213269.2013.798853.

Kim, S. J., & Hancock, J. T. (2014, February). Misleading marketing tactics in health adver-torials: Measuring advertising schema activation through lexical decision tasks. Paper to be presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Austin, TX, February 13-15, 2013.

Kim, H. K. & Niederdeppe, J. (2013). The role of emotional response during an H1N1 in-fluenza pandemic on a college campus. Journal of Public Relations Research, 25(1), 30-50.

Jeff Hancock was recently awarded a Top Paper Award from the NCA for his paper entitled “The Linguistic Traces of Psychopathy in Email, Text Messaging, and Facebook.”

Sahara Byrne was recently featured in the Cornell Chronicle’s ar-ticle, “Faculty-in-residence promote engaged learning,” which discusses her various weekly and monthly student programs in Mews Hall.

Jonathon Schuldt discusses the persuasive effects of green label-ing in The Atlantic’s "If It's Green It Must Be Healthy" and US News’ "Consumers View Foods with Green Labeling as Healthi-er” articles.

Faculty In the News

Select Honors & Awards

Lee Humphreys was recently elected to serve as Vice Chair of the Com-munication & Technology Division of the ICA .

Geri Gay and her postdoctoral fellows at the Interaction Design Lab have won the prestigious $100,000 Heritage Open mHealth Challenge for the mental wellness app, ‘MoodRhythm’. The app helps people with mood disorders learn about their daily rhythms and stay in balance.

Jeff Hancock received a Rising Star Award at the Fall 2013 CALS Awards.

We’re on the Move... to Mann!

After more than two decades in Kennedy Hall, the Department of Communication is

moving to a new space on the 4th floor of Mann. This move

is due in part to our growth as a department, and it will also

allow us to think creatively about how to design a space that

meets our needs today as well as in the future. The faculty

has recently endorsed an initial conceptual scheme.

(Picture: the 4th floor of Mann Library without the stacks.)

Enjoy the holidays, and have a safe & healthy winter break!

Contact Information

Department Chair: Geri Gay, gkg1@cornell.edu

Assistant to Department Chair: Jennifer Pierre, jp639@cornell.edu

Department Website: communication.cals.cornell.edu

LinkedIn Account: LinkedIn

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