EVENT DETAILS

Panel: Communicating with the Public

Panel on Communicating with the Public
featuring Janet Wilson (UCI Communications), Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow (Humanities Commons), and Professor Suellen Hopfer (Public Health)

Panelists will share their work translating scientific research and environmental challenges into accessible prose for multiple publics.

This workshop is part of Professor Steve Allison's "Communication Skills in Environmental Science" course (ECO/EVO 203a). Through a special partnership with the Humanities Commons, humanities graduate students may enroll in Professor Allison's course, or attend three open sessions, including this one.

Janet Wilson is Director of Special Projects for UCI Communications. She is an award-winning journalist and communicator. She earned her B.A. from Yale University, her M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and was named a Harvard University Nieman Fellow for her coverage of juvenile violence in Detroit. At UCI, she works with faculty, students and administrators, translating academic trends into plain English, and publicizing new findings via hundreds of news outlets. She was a frontline reporter on a Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize winning team and reported from Ground Zero after 9/11. As part of the Times' environment team she broke stories on everything from the Grand Canyon being used to benefit power companies to inner city areas grappling with pollution to White House officials quashing scientific findings. 

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine. Her writing has appeared in Slate, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Dissent, where she is a contributing editor. She was previously a contributing writer for the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, a columnist for the urban affairs website Next City, and a Journalism and Media Fellow at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Her book, Personal Stereo, a cultural history of the Walkman, was published by Bloomsbury in September 2017.
 
Suellen Hopfer  is an assistant professor of Public Health at UCI. She has an educational background in human genetics and communication. She conducts research around effective messaging for topics including vaccine communication, health impacts of climate change/media portrayals of climate change, and communicating genetic health information. She takes a communication lens to addressing public health problems including the public health impacts of climate change. A key part of this research involves identifying what kinds of framing may be more likely to engage and motivate behavior change on the part of the public. Additionally, a communication principle applied to designing effective messaging also includes how to strategically segment audiences to be able to tailor messaging and reach audiences effectively.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.