November 12, 2026
Awards
Professor Jeff Niederdeppe received the K. Everett Rogers Award from the Public Health Education and Health Promotion Section of the American Public Health Association. The award honors outstanding contributions to advancing the study and/or practice of public health communication, including (1) advancing public health communication practice and/or theory/research; (2) teaching, training, and/or mentoring future generations of public health communication practitioners and scholars; and (3) advancing the field of health communication in public health.
Events
Join us for COMMColloquium Monday, November 16, 2026, 3:00 pm, in 102 Mann Library Building. Graduate student Ria Gualano will present “Co-Designing Disability-Inclusive Worlds: Exploring Disability Narratives and Representation through Community Engagement with Emerging Technologies and the Arts.” The colloquium is followed by a reception located in The Hub of the Department of Communication.
Grants
Professor Natalie Bazarova, Co-PI (with C. Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, J. Kleinberg et al.), received a grant for the project “Rebuilding Trust in Civic Discourse: An Auditable AI-Mediated Infrastructure.”
The multi-year, $10,000,000 “moonshot” award from the Laude Institute will support the team’s vision of rebuilding trust in civic discourse by developing and deploying auditable AI infrastructure grounded in communities’ agency and governance processes. For the Moonshots research competition, the Laude Institute asked today’s most consequential AI researchers how they would use AI to solve humanity’s hardest problems if they had the resources. The team first received a $250,000 seed grant to develop their proposal, which showed early results and progress. Their project was one of four winners chosen from eight finalists. Graduate student Mandy Luo serves as a lead graduate student on the project’s Community Engagement component. The project and award were featured in the Cornell Chronicle article “Project to Rebuild Trust in AI Era Lands Laude’s $10M ‘Moonshot’ Award.”
Publications
Associate Professor Neil Lewis, Jr., Postdoctoral Associate Eunyoung Myung, Tashara Leak, November 2026, “Communication Strategies and Diet Intake among Fruit and Vegetable Incentive Program Participants in Upstate New York: A Cross-Sectional Analysis,” Family and Community Health. The research and publication were featured in the Cornell Chronicle article “Direct Communication Is Best for Getting Program’s Healthy-Eating Message Across.”
In this paper, the authors studied the effects of face-to-face vs. mediated communication strategies for increasing uptake of a nutrition incentive program designed to make it easier for low-income New Yorkers to access healthier foods. They found that face-to-face communication strategies predicted greater fruit and vegetable intake than mediated communication, which has implications for the design of program administration and outreach as well as communication theory.
