Category: Health Information Technology Studies

Dhavan Shah on stage at the ICA Conference receiving the B. Audrey Fisher Mentorship Award

At their 72^nd Annual Conference in Paris France, the International Communication Association (ICA) awarded its B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award to SJMC Maier-Bascom Professor Dhavan Shah.

Since 1988, the B. Aubrey Fisher Award has been given to honor outstanding scholars, teachers, and advisors who serve as role models in those capacities and who have had a major impact on the field of communication. Most importantly, recipients of this award have influenced the discipline through their former students, who themselves are important figures in the communication discipline.

“Shah is praised for his fairness, willingness to collaborate, unconditional support, ability to help students see the larger implications of their ideas, and unwavering intellectual generosity,” said Craig Scott, Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, who conferred the award to Shah. “Dr. Dhavan Shah embodies the B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award, and we are delighted to present him with it.”

“I owe a great debt to my mentors — Ivan Preston, Dan Wackman, Jack McLeod, and Dave Gustafson — who shaped my approach to research, teaching, and advising,” Shah said. “To be recognized for mentoring others and shaping the field through our joint scholarship and the work of my advisees means I paid that debt forward.”

SJMC Professor and MCRC Director Dhavan Shah

Shah has involved many students in his research and has served as major advisor for over 40 doctoral students, and a committee member on another 80 dissertations across ten departments. His advisees and mentees have gone on to research and teach at some of the world’s leading institutions and earn recognition for their work.

“Dhavan has supported my career teaching me about the research process, doing research with me, but most importantly teaching me how to become an independent researcher, one that can help develop new cohorts of researchers,” said Hernando Rojas, SJMC Professor and Director and one of Shah’s doctoral advisees. “Most importantly his mentoring never ends. Having been a professor for 15 years now myself, I regularly turn to his advice on how to navigate professional challenges, knowing I will always find a sympathetic ear and a smart answer. Simply put, I would not be in academia today if it were not for Dhavan.”

Shah’s research focuses on the influence of electronic and digital media on social judgments, civic and political engagement, and health support and behavior. He is the author of over 140 articles and 20 book chapters. He has co-edited five books and is the author of News Frames and National Security: Covering Big Brother with SJMC colleague Professor Doug McLeod and Battleground: Asymmetric Communication Ecologies and the Erosion of Civil Society in Wisconsin with current and former UW colleagues Lew Friedland, Mike Wagner, Chris Wells, Kathy Cramer, and Jon Pevehouse.

Dhavan Shah responds to questions during a panel “Media After The Midterms” at the Overture Center in Madison, Wis., on Nov. 7, 2018. (Photo by Jeff Miller / UW-Madison)

“Dhavan continues to be a sounding board of advice and perspective, nearly 10 years removed from my student days,” said Stephanie Edgerly, Associate Professor in the Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University and one of Shah’s doctoral advisees. “I am forever grateful for his mentorship and imprint on my career. He provided me with a map for navigating the world of academia, while encouraging me to choose my own path and go at my own pace. The fields of communication, journalism, and political science are better because of Dhavan’s mentorship.”

Shah serves as the Director of the Mass Communication Research Center (MCRC), Scientific Director in the Active Aging Research Center and Scientific Director in the Center for Health Enhancement System Studies (CHESS). He holds appointments in the Industrial and Systems Engineering, Marketing and Political Science departments.

Dhavan guided me and my colleagues toward important lessons about how to live as a scholar,” said Kjerstin Thorson, Brandt Endowed Associate Professor of Political Communication in the College of Communication Arts & Sciences at Michigan State University and one of Shah’s doctoral advisees. “The lesson I value most is generosity. Dhavan taught us that a great scholar is generous with their time, ideas, opportunities, and mentorship.”

In 2016, Shah was elected as an ICA Fellow in recognition of his distinguished scholarly contributions to the broad field of communications. Shah’s SJMC colleague Professor Emeritus Jack McLeod also received the Fisher Award in 1991.

At the American Political Science Association’s 2021 Annual Meeting, alum Yini Zhang (PhD’20) received the Thomas E. Patterson Best Dissertation Award from the Political Communication section for her dissertation “A Network Approach to Understanding Public Attention, Public Opinion and Communication Flows in the Digital Media System.”

The Thomas E. Patterson Best Dissertation Award recognizes the best dissertation completed in the field of political communication in the previous year. Zhang centered her dissertation around the core question of how digital media impact the U.S. political communication landscape.

“In my dissertation, I proposed a new theoretical and methodological framework to study the question of “who follows and who leads” in the US communication ecology,” Zhang said. “Specifically, the framework takes into account how actors of different backgrounds are now able to use social media to build online networks and project voices. It emphasizes the heterogeneous communication streams on social media, applies social network analysis to detect networks of actors, and explores their relationship with news media attention and coverage.”

University at Buffalo Assistant Professor Yini Zhang (PhD’20)

Now an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at the University at Buffalo, Zhang is also a UW-Madison Mass Communication Research Center (MCRC) Fellow. She credits her time in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication with giving her the tools she needed to craft her award-winning dissertation.

“I see this award as more of a collective than a personal achievement,” Zhang said. “At SJMC, there has been a strong support system and a nourishing academic environment. My advisors, colleagues, the staff members and all those who I interacted with helped me become who I am today. I feel very lucky that I get to do things that I enjoy doing and get recognized for my work.”

One such member of Zhang’s strong support system was her co-advisor SJMC Maier-Bascom Professor Dhavan Shah. Shah is also the director of the MCRC.

SJMC Professor and MCRC Director Dhavan Shah

“Yini’s dissertation and her broader program of research are incredibly innovative and impactful, integrating communication and sociology with network and computer science, She is a worthy recipient of this honor,” Shah said. “She enriched the MCRC not just with her intelligence and research acumen but by being a generous collaborator, student leader and peer mentor. We are lucky to still have her as a fellow.”

Zhang’s other co-advisor was former SJMC faculty member Chris Wells. Wells is now an Associate Professor of Emerging Media Studies in the College of Communication at Boston University and serves as a participating faculty member in the MCRC.

Boston University Associate Professor Chris Wells

“This award is such a well-deserved recognition of Yini’s work,” Wells said. “While at UW-Madison, she crafted an innovative field of study for herself rooted in SJMC. But she also branched out and took courses and collaborated with professors from statistics, computer science and elsewhere. Her work is on the cutting edge of both communication theory and computational methods, and this award shows it.”