As a health communication scholar, I study how communication drives positive behavior change. My research seeks to understand why some people make choices that protect their health while others do not, and how we can design messages that support better decision-making and motivate risk-reducing behaviors. To answer these questions, my work draws on theories from communication, social psychology, public health, and behavioral science.
My prior research explores how interpersonal and social dynamics shape health beliefs and behaviors, particularly in underrepresented populations. These studies laid the foundation my central focus: evaluating health risk messages and their potential to motivate or disengage audiences. Put simply, I ask:
"How can we design health risk messages that reach the right person with the right information at the right time?"
To explore this question, I examine both the intended and unintended health message effects. One line of this research investigates what message strategies motivate action. Another lines of work explores what happens when health messages are repeated too often. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I found that people inundated with health messages reported feeling burned out, bored, and irritated; some pushed back against the messages, while others tuned out entirely. These findings highlight a critical tension for public health campaigns: messages designed to save lives can inadvertently drive people away if they fail to balance urgency with overload.
This body of work has been featured twice in the CDC Health Communication Science Digest and was cited by the Association of Health Care Journalists for its relevance to public health messaging.
From 2021 to 2023, I served as a Co-Investigator on an NIH-funded research project (1R01CA229324-01A1; PI: Massey) that launched a social media intervention on Twitter (now X) to promote HPV vaccination among parents with children aged 9-14. On this multi-institutional research team, I contributed to research design, co-authored three articles, and led a study examining the relative advantage of narrative and non-narrative messages. This study showed that for parents who were not ready to consider the vaccine, facts (non-narratives) were more persuasive than stories (narratives). For those already thinking about or planning to vaccinate, facts and stories were equally effective. These findings suggest that effective health promotion and risk communication depends not just on what we say, but when and how we say it.
You can explore my full list of publications on my Google Scholar and PudMed.
