As always, host Bob Barrett selects an Academic Minute to air during The Best of Our Knowledge.
Each week this program examines some of the issues unique to college campuses, looks at the latest research, and invites commentary from experts and administrators from all levels of education.
For this week‘s edition (#1264), Bob has selected Dr. Brian Southwell of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s segment on disparate nature of sharing information on social media.
Dr. Brian Southwell is Director of the Science in the Public Sphere Program in the Center for Communication Science at RTI International. He also is a Research Professor (of Mass Communication) and Adjunct Associate Professor (of Health Behavior) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition, Dr. Southwell is an Adjunct Professor with Duke University’s Energy Initiative, a university-wide effort to promote innovation in energy consumption and delivery.
Before moving to North Carolina, Southwell served for almost a decade at the University of Minnesota, most recently as Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication with an adjunct appointment in the School of Public Health. Additionally, he has worked for a variety of nonprofit and government organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Ogilvy Public Relations.
Southwell has conducted research on topics such as campaign measurement and evaluation, with emphasis on exposure measurement, the intersection of interpersonal communication, social networks, and mass communication, and the role of aging and memory. His research also has spanned a number of behaviors and audiences, including the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s antidrug efforts with adolescents, CDC’s cancer prevention and screening promotion efforts, the National Science Foundation’s efforts to reach local television news viewers, various state-level campaigns and projects for the Food and Drug Administration. The National Institutes of Health and other sources also have funded his work. Dr. Southwell’s contributions appear in more than 70 journal articles and chapters, in publications such as Social Science and Medicine and Communication Research. In 2013, Johns Hopkins University Press released his Social Networks and Popular Understanding of Science and Health, which has been a widely reviewed book. He has served as senior editor for Health Communication and as a member of the editorial board of Public Opinion Quarterly and seven other editorial boards. He co-edited a special issue of Communication Theory in 2009 on conversations and campaigns and is co-editing a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Communication on misinformation.
Southwell’s 2002 dissertation, completed at the University of Pennsylvania, was awarded the Health Communication Dissertation of the Year jointly by the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association. In 2006, he was awarded the Arthur “Red” Motley Exemplary Teaching Award at the University of Minnesota. In 2011, he won RTI International’s President’s Award. In 2012, the National Communication Association’s Health Communication division recognized him with the Distinguished Article Award for a 2007 paper co-authored with Dr. Marco Yzer.
