Medill welcomes new faculty for 2024-25 academic year

EVANSTON, ILL. -- Five new faculty members will join the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications for the 2024-25 academic year.

“These new faculty will expand Medill’s research footprint and deepen our level of scholarship,” said Dean Charles Whitaker. “Their knowledge and diverse perspectives will prepare our students to become leaders in journalism and marketing.”

New faculty members:

Carolyn Wells Keller

Carolyn Wells Keller will serve as a lecturer in the Integrated Marketing Communications program. Keller is a recent graduate of the marketing program at the Kellogg School of Management. Her research focuses on the properties of cuteness–what is cute and who likes cute products. Her teaching interests are consumer behavior and research methods.

Matt Kiefer

Matt Kiefer will serve as assistant professor in the Journalism program. Kiefer comes from WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR affiliate, where he worked as the news applications editor and broke down large and complex sets of information into stories for Chicagoans. Prior to joining WBEZ, Kiefer worked on an R&D team at the Washington Post, where he developed and supported products to automate public records requests and analyze large document collections for investigative projects.

Natalie Moore (MSJ99)

Natalie Moore will serve as senior lecturer and director of audio programming in the Journalism program. Moore covered segregation and inequality for WBEZ. Her enterprise reporting has tackled race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. Moore’s work has been broadcast on the BBC, Marketplace and NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition.

Julian Runge

Julian Runge will serve as assistant professor in the Integrated Marketing Communications program. Runge studies the effects of digital marketing technologies and algorithms in digital media and games. With a background in behavioral economics, he works on problems of high practical relevance in digital marketing. To date, his research has been published in leading marketing and information systems journals such as Information Systems Research or Marketing Letters. His paper on “Price Promotions and ‘Freemium’ App Monetization” won the 2022 best paper award of the journal Quantitative Marketing and Economics. 

Chao Yu

Chao Yu will serve as assistant professor in the Integrated Marketing Communications program. Yu’s research primarily explores the social impacts of new media, with a particular focus on digital commercial platforms that gather consumer behaviors. He uses big data analytics to uncover underlying patterns in new media platforms that may contribute to biases or inequalities. Yu’s goal is to identify effective policies and strategies to mitigate these issues and promote equitable outcomes. His work has been published in high-impact journals, including Science Advances, New Media & Society, and the International Journal of Hospitality Management.