National Communication Association Recognizes Five UCSB Faculty Members
The recipients include Tamara Afifi, Walid Afifi, Howard Giles, David Seibold, and Cynthia Stohl. The awards were presented in November, at the organization’s annual meeting in New Orleans.
Tamara Afifi, professor of communication, received the 2011 Bernard J. Brommel Award, which recognizes the scholarship and academic leadership of a faculty member who has advanced family communication at the local, regional, and national level over a period of five years.
Walid Afifi, professor of communication, received the 2011 Health Communication Distinguished Article of the Year award, which recognizes an article published in the last 10 years that has made a significant contribution to health communication. Afifi and co-author Judith L. Weiner were honored for their 2004 article, “Toward a Theory of Motivated Information Management,” which appeared in the journal Communication Theory.
Giles, professor of communication, received the 2011 Outstanding Journal Article Award for “Psycholinguistic and Social Psychological Components of Communication by Older Adults,” which appeared in a 1986 issue of the journal Language and Communication. The award, presented by the NCA’s Communication and Aging Division, recognizes an article’s overall contribution to that area of study. Giles’s co-authors include communication scholars Ellen Bouchard Ryan, Giampiero Bertolucci, and Karen Henwood.
Siebold, professor of communication, received the 2011 Career Achievement Award from the NCA’s Group Communication Division. The award acknowledges a scholar who has made outstanding theoretical, methodological, and practical contributions to the study of group communication.
Stohl, professor of communication, received the 2011 Outstanding Scholarship Award for Best Article, presented by the NCA’s International and Intercultural Division. Stohl and co-author Shiv Ganesh were recognized for their article, “Qualifying Engagement: A Study of Information and Communication Technology and the Global Social Justice Movement in Aotearoa, New Zealand,” which appeared in the journal Communication Monographs.
“When one thinks of academic excellence in the social sciences at UCSB, the Department of Communication immediately comes to mind,” said Melvin Oliver, SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences at UCSB. “The faculty are trailblazers, and their research is cutting-edge. These awards from the National Communication Association attest to the faculty’s excellence and impact. We are so proud of their contributions to developing and extending theories and empirical findings in the field of communication.”
Other award recipients include Mary Brinson of San Diego State University, who received the 2011 Lynda Lee Kaid Outstanding Dissertation Award, and Charls Choi of George Fox University, who received the 2011 Communication and Aging Dissertation of the Year Award. Both Brinson and Choi completed their doctoral degrees in communication at UCSB in 2010.
