Jeff Niederdeppe is Associate Dean of Faculty Development for the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and a Professor of Communication and Public Policy at Cornell University. His research examines the effects of media campaigns, strategic messages and news coverage in shaping health behavior, social policy and health equity.

Neil Lewis Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University and Division of General Internal Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. His research examines how people’s social contexts and identities influence their motivation to pursue their goals, and the implication of those processes for interventions to improve health equity.

Jamila Michener is an Associate Professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University. She studies poverty, racism, and public policy, with a particular focus on health and housing. She is author of the award-winning book, Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics. She is Associate Dean for Public Engagement at the Brooks School of Public Policy, co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, co-director of the Politics of Race, Immigration, Class and Ethnicity (PRICE) research initiative, and board chair of the Cornell Prison Education Program.

Colleen L. Barry is the inaugural dean of the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on how health and social policies can affect a range of outcomes for individuals with mental illness and substance use, and communities at risk for violence. She also studies how communication strategies can increase public support for evidence-based policies to improve the health and wellbeing of people with mental illness and substance use disorders and reduce stigma.

Norman Porticella is a Research Associate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. His research examines public engagement in science, community science capacity, and health communication. He also manages the department’s Mobile Media Lab and related data collection.

Kwanho Kim is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University. His research examines the influences of the public communication environment on health-related outcomes among people with different sociocultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Jiawei Liu is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. His research examines the effects of mass media messages regarding various public policy issues and public health issues.

Sarah Rozenblum is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. Her research explores how policymakers in North America and Western Europe use science to craft public health policies, disseminate expert knowledge, and communicate with the public.

Teairah Taylor is a PhD Candidate in Communication at Cornell University. Her research interests include health disparities, health equity, and community engagement.

Sarah Gollust is an Associate Professor in the Division of Health Policy and Management at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Her research examines the influence of the media and public opinion in the health policy process, the dissemination of research into policymaking, and the politics of health policy.

Rebekah Nagler is Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts and an Associate Professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Nagler’s research examines the effects of routine exposure to health information in the media.

Muna Hassan is a dedicated epidemiologist and research coordinator, specializing in health equity initiatives. In her current role, she provides vital support for grant-funded projects, focusing on strategic communication for advancing health equity and promoting equal access to cancer care.

Kristina Medero is a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Minnesota. Her understanding of health disparities were shaped by her experiences as a health worker in the US and health-educator in South Africa. While earning her PhD in communication from the Ohio State University, she developed a research program focused on examining how the use of messages and narratives may attenuate health disparities among stigmatized social groups (e.g., racial/sexual underserved groups, individuals with mental illness, etc).

CeRon Ford is a PhD Student in Health Services Research, Policy, and Administration at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. His research interests include health and healthcare politics, health disparities and inequities, and health and social policy; specifically examining the potential health impacts of U.S. policies on historically marginalized populations.

Chloe Gansen is a PhD student in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests are in health communication, determinants of vaccination, and media content that contributes to the politicization of science and health information.

Yusra Murad is a PhD student in Health Services Research, Policy, and Administration at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Her research interests are at the intersection of housing, healthcare and journalism, with a focus on how media narratives can contribute to the ongoing work of establishing housing as healthcare; identifying structural racism as a driver of the housing crisis and subsequent poor health outcomes; and ultimately compel policy change.

Carson Crane is an MPH Student in Public Health Administration and Policy at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Her research interests include health communication, community engagement, and policy making in response to emerging issues and technologies.

Quin Nelson is an MPH Student at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Her research interests include mental health equity and medical sociology.

Erika Franklin Fowler is a Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and a Co-Director of the Wesleyan Media Project. Her research tracks and examines the content and effect of local messaging in electoral and health policy settings.

Steven Moore is an Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. His research explores the organization of racial attitudes in the mass public and how they shape and are shaped by various political phenomena, particularly public policy and media coverage.

Breeze Floyd is the Program Manager for the Wesleyan Media Project at Wesleyan University. She contributes to data collection and analyses for WMP’s research projects.

Pavel Oleinikov uses his background in social and natural sciences to advance the application of quantitative methods to data from the social world. A large part of his work lies in assisting Wesleyan faculty in integrating diverse data sources in the form of text, images, and data from APIs. Pavel has a PhD in Political Science from University of California, Santa Barbara.

Natália de Paula Moreira is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Wesleyan University. Her primary fields of interest are public opinion, political methodology, and public policy. Moreira received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of São Paulo in 2021. She also holds a master’s degree in political science and a BA in social science. From 2017 to 2018, Moreira was a visiting student at the political science department at Texas A&M University.

Furkan Cakmak is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Wesleyan. His research interests are political psychology and political communication within the American political context. His dissertation focuses on the relationship between media choice and affective polarization and the role of emotions within that relation. His other research agenda centers around using supervised machine learning models to measure polarization among political elites using text data. Furkan received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Washington State University in 2023.

Meiqing Zhang is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science at Wesleyan Media Project. Her research examines the evolution of political values and attitudes in relation to ideological, cognitive and affective polarization.

Jielu Yao is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Wesleyan. Jielu’s research interests center on political methodology and American politics. Particularly, she is interested in applying supervised, unsupervised, and deep learning techniques to non-traditional data such as text, image/video, and audio. Using WMP’s political ads, her dissertation examines crime rhetoric adopted by female and racial/ethnic minority candidates. Jielu received her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in Political Science in 2020.

Dominique Monserrat is the Research Coordinator for the Wesleyan Media Project at Wesleyan Univeristy. She holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of Virginia and a BA from Wesleyan University.

Laura Baum
AICP, Urban planning & program management professional

Markus Neumann
Assistant Professor of Political Science and Computational Social Science at Duke Kunshan University

Margaret Tait
Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Studies at the University of Richmond

Yiwei Xu
Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for an Informed Public (CIP) in the Information School at the University of Washington