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Dr. Carla Fisher to Join CJC Advertising Department

Dr. Carla Fisher
Dr. Carla Fisher

University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications announced that Dr. Carla Fisher will be joining the College in Fall 2016 as assistant professor in the Advertising Department.

Fisher is currently an assistant professor at George Mason University’s Department of Communication and Center for Health & Risk Communication and affiliate faculty with the Departments of Human Development and Family Science and Women and Gender Studies. She is the director for the health communication minor program and facilitates doctoral health communication students’ collaborative research training with medical residents at a military hospital. And she is an affiliate member of the Georgetown Fisher Center for Familial Cancer Research.

Fisher’s research examines the importance of family communication to health in the family environment and clinical setting, with a special focus on how families cope with health transitions and the therapeutic or long-term health implications of their interaction.  She will bring to UFCJC expertise in messaging strategy and audience insights that are central to advertising curriculum at both our undergraduate and graduate levels.​

She is best known for her research program on mother-daughter communication, breast cancer coping and prevention, which involves collaborations with leading institutions such as the Mayo Clinic and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Carla’s 2014 bookCoping Together, Side by Side: Enriching Mother-Daughter Communication across the Breast Cancer Journeyis the first translational, research-based book on the psychosocial experience of coping with breast cancer from the mother-daughter perspective. It has been praised by Johns Hopkins’ Breast Center and reviewed by top journals in the field of psycho-oncology and health communication. Her work has been funded at the federal, private and local levels and published in journals like Health Communication and Journal of Genetic Counseling.

Prior to joining GMU, Carla was co-founder and coordinator of research of the Family Communication Consortium (FCC) at Arizona State University, where she remains affiliate faculty. She is a former pre-doctoral Fellow with the National Institute on Aging (NIA) with post-doctoral training in health behavior theory from the National Cancer Institute (NCI).  She has also been an invited expert consultant for the government including the USAID, the Office of Women’s Health (OWH) in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and the military.

Posted: January 6, 2016
Category: College News
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