Communications and PR

Jacqueline Babb is a marketing professional with expertise in nonprofit organizations, corporate social responsibility, and the intersection of brand and values. She works with organizations on strategy and how to position values-based marketing with audiences.

Danielle Robinson Bell's expertise is strategic communications with a lens on culture, community, equity, and inclusion.

Gerry Chiaro is associate professor and director of IMC Immersion Quarter with a long background in business, specifically marketing leadership. His expertise: Brand Strategy Leadership, and Consulting. Gerry has developed nearly 250 team consulting projects for our graduate students.

He joined the faculty in January 2009 and earned a full-time appointment in 2012.

Abigail Foerstner is an award-winning reporter covering and teaching health, environment and science journalism. She teaches students how to bridge between an increasingly technological culture and general audiences who rely on science journalism to make critical decisions and understand the wonders around them. She teaches multimedia journalism.

Neil Golden is an active business and marketing leader with a track record of helping organizations strengthen financial and brand performance. His expertise spans the restaurant/food, alcoholic beverage, real estate, active recreation and online education areas.

Desiree Hanford's expertise centers on business, markets and money. She was an equities reporter for Dow Jones Inc. before joining Medill as a faculty member. Her research focus is on activist shareholders and Gen Z motivations in pursuing journalism in a time of media mistrust.

Ashlee Humphreys is a sociologist who examines core topics in consumer behavior and marketing strategy. Her research investigates topics in social media, market creation, language, and digital satisfaction. Humphreys is the author of "Social Media: Enduring Principles," and she is the creator of the Digital Satisfaction Index (DSI).

Candy Lee's work on leadership and the effects of voice in technology are showcased in her research. She also does work on customer retention through loyalty, membership, pricing, display, management, attrition consideration, acquisition and growth strategy. Her focus on sport marketing involves diverse arenas from fandom to sponsorship.

Edward Malthouse's research interests center on customer engagement and experiences; digital, social and mobile media; media management; big data; customer relationship management and lifetime value models; recommender systems; and predictive analytics.

Frank Mulhern does research on media economics and technology and its impact on brand communications. His work connects technology to customer data and marketing analytics; particularly with respect to retailing and e-commerce marketing.

Michael Spikes' research is centered on the practice and pedagogy of media literacy education (MLE) and news media literacy (NML) toward encouraging critical thinking to limit the effects of exposure to mis- and disinformation. His focus is on the design, assessment, and enactments of MLE & NML in classrooms and other learning environments.

Vijay Viswanathan studies customer experience and marketing effectiveness in B2C and B2B using surveys, text analytics and machine learning. His current work is on online communities, virtual influencers, loyalty programs and governance. He has given numerous talks to industry on customer centricity, embedding AI in analytics and enabling a data culture.

Charles Whitaker is an expert in diversity in media, media business models, and magazine reporting and publishing. His research has also focused on media coverage of education policy and pedagogy.

Yu Xu is an Assistant Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications and (by courtesy) Communication Studies at Northwestern University. His research interests include media industries and analytics, social and communication networks, organizational change, ecology and evolution, and computational social science. His work has been published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Communication Monographs, New Media & Society, the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Service Management, Political Communication, and Information Communication & Society. He serves on the editorial boards of Human Communication Research and the Journal of Service Management. He teaches courses on digital media strategies and social networks at Medill and is the recipient of the “IMC Teacher of the Year 2022” award.