Special Topics

J.A. Adande has more than three decades of experience in sports media, including stops at ESPN, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times. He has produced content for online, TV, radio, podcasts and (once upon a time) newspapers. He was the editor for the Year's Best Sports Writing 2022 collection.

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.

Roger Boye has written at least a thousand articles related to numismatics (the study and history of coins/medals/tokens/paper money) and is a contributing editor of The Numismatist magazine. He has been parliamentarian of the Northwestern Faculty Senate since 2016 and is past president of the Northwestern Emeriti Organization..

Debbie Cenziper's investigative stories focus on social justice reporting, from affordable housing corruption to breakdowns in child welfare systems. Debbie has spent more than 20 years writing for major daily newspapers, including the Miami Herald and The Washington Post.

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.

Jonathan Copulsky's research focuses on the impact of digital disruption and innovative technologies on brand-customer interactions. He is the co-author of two critically acclaimed books on digital disruption (The Technology Fallacy and The Transformation Myth). He also researches and writes about the evolution of business-to-business marketing.

Kelly Cutler has more than 20 years of experience with digital marketing and digital media. Her work focuses on the areas of search marketing, social media marketing, programmatic, retargeting and digital analytics and measurement. She works in both theory and practice.

Michael Deas focuses on editing and libel as well as multimedia reporting. He is a former editor on the national-foreign and news-design staffs at Chicago Tribune. He was among contributors, including former President Jimmy Carter, who wrote tributes for "Grace Under Fire: Barbara Jordan's Rhetoric of Watergate, Patriotism, and Equality."

Elise De Los Santos is an editor with experience in both traditional and new media. She was executive editor of RedEye, the Chicago Tribune’s publication for millennials, and was an editor on the Tribune's copy desk and audience team, editing stories for print and online publication.

Craig Duff's long career in video journalism spans broadcast/cable news, long-form television, documentary filmmaking and video on digital platforms (including key roles at the New York Times and TIME). Craig leads the video and broadcast specialization at Medill and has developed a popular course in producing and reporting video for social media.

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.

Brent E. Huffman's research centers around China's economic influence and presence around the world in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. He has also done extensive research about threatened cultural heritage and human rights issues around the globe. He can also talk about the U.S. and international documentary production, working in conflict, etc.

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).

Craig LaMay is a long-time scholar and practitioner in the field of international assistance, currently at Northwestern’s Qatar campus. His expertise is in international speech law and norms. He is also a sports historian, focusing on Middle East sports, U.S. sport, sports media history, and sport and human rights.

Kari Lydersen's research focuses, among other things, on the intersection of economics, culture, environment, labor, history and social impacts in regards to extractive industries in Midwestern (specifically water, coal, copper, oil and gas) urban, rural and Native American communities.

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.

Jon Marshall's research focuses on journalism history and the relationship between presidents and the press, especially investigative journalism. His books include Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis and Watergate's Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse.

Abe Peck has worked in magazines for 40 years as a writer/editor (Rolling Stone, Outside, etc.), an author, a consultant and as Medill's director of B2B communication. The author of “Uncovering the Sixties: the Life and Times of the Underground Press,” he curated Medill's recent series on Media and the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Ceci Rodgers focuses on global economic and financial market forces that impact everyday people. Her expertise lies in broad economic trends (demographics, technology, Fed policy) in the U.S. and Japan, as well as derivatives and other financial innovations. She studies the relationship of the media and financial markets.

Elizabeth Shogren has extensive background reporting on environment, energy and climate change. She probed the climate costs of cryptocurrency and natural gas. She covered the Clinton White House, Congress and many federal agencies and was a foreign correspondent in Russia. Her investigations exposed government censorship of science.

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.

Karen Springen, who spent nearly a quarter century with Newsweek magazine, follows how technology is changing the way journalists report and share their work. In the summer of 2022, she and two Medill undergraduates researched the "Tweetie Burd-en" -- the pressure many journalists feel to use social media. She also reviews books for Booklist.

Steven W. Thrasher's research uses journalistic and social science methods to study the intersection of LGBTQ history, racism, policing, incarceration, health disparities and HIV/AIDS. His most recent research focuses on the criminalization of HIV/AIDS and the Black Lives Matter movement in Missouri.

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.

Caryn Ward’s experience and teaching center around video storytelling and broadcast news. She has almost 30 years of experience in local television newsrooms. Ward is also working on research centered around how Gen Z student journalists see their role in the industry and what motivates them to choose journalism.

Michelle F. Weinberger's research uses a socio-cultural lens to understand the relationship between consumption activities, marketplace institutions, social relations, and inequality, examining substantive contexts such as collective rituals, gift giving, experiential consumption, and crowdfunding.

Zach Wise's research centers on the intersection of technology and journalism. He does iterative applied research in immersive media (AR/VR) and new storytelling forms. Through his work in the Knight Lab at Northwestern, he also creates and directs the creation of storytelling tools that are used by publications all over the world.