Our People

Dr. Florence Chee is Associate Professor of Digital Communication in the School of Communication and Program Director of the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy (CDEP) at Loyola University Chicago. She is also Founding Director of the Social & Interactive Media Lab Chicago (SIMLab), devoted to the in-depth study of social phenomena at the intersection of society and technology.

Her research examines the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of emergent digital lifestyles with a particular focus on the examination of artificial intelligence, games, social media, mobile platforms, and translating insights about their lived contexts across industrial, governmental, and academic sectors.

She serves as an External Consultee to the Freedom Online Coalition's (FOC) Taskforce on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights (T-FAIR) and is a Key Constituent of the United Nations 3C Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence.

She has designed and taught graduate/undergraduate courses in Digital Media including Game Studies, where students engage with debates surrounding diversity, intersectionality and media production through social justice frameworks. 

Recent work in games, diversity, and ethics appears in Feminist Media Studies, Human Technology Journal, Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, and the International Journal of Cultural Studies. She is the author of Digital Game Culture in Korea: The Social at Play (forthcoming 2023, Lexington Books), which is a critique of media discourses surrounding online game addiction and an ethnographic exploration of the social and cultural roles that games fulfill in everyday life.

https://www.luc.edu/soc/florencechee.shtml

Follow her on Twitter @cheeflo

For inquiries by email, contact fchee@luc.edu.

mdougherty@luc.edu
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Meghan Dougherty is a media scholar whose research focuses on three areas: communication technologies and media cultures, critical studies of media infrastructures, and media archaeology. She joined the faculty in 2010, and teaches courses in media theory, digital culture, interactive storytelling, and environmental impacts of digital information infrastructure.

Dr. Dougherty’s current research aims to materialize Internet infrastructure in wild, protected, and public lands to understand more about the real world costs of our digital lives. 

jgeisler@luc.edu

Jill Geisler is Loyola’s Bill Plante Chair in Leadership and Media Integrity and an internationally respected expert in leadership and management. She teaches and coaches in news organizations worldwide.

She is the author of the book Work Happy: What Great Bosses Know, producer of the podcast “Q&A: Leadership and Integrity in the Digital Age,” and creator of management columns for the Columbia Journalism Review and the National Press Club Journalism Institute. Previously, she headed the leadership and management programs of the Poynter Institute and was among the country’s first female TV news directors.

In 2018, she was named the Freedom Forum Institute Fellow in Women’s Leadership and leads its Power Shift Project, the Freedom Forum's groundbreaking program to eradicate harassment and discrimination in workplaces.

Jill has been inducted to multiple media halls of fame, including the prestigious Silver Circle of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

dkamerer@luc.edu

David Kamerer serves as Associate Professor in Public Relations and Digital Media at the School of Communication. He teachers courses in public relations, new media, public service communication and research methods.

Kamerer’s professional career includes 10 years in public service and health communication, including serving as director of communication for Envision, a non-profit agency which offers resources to people who are blind or have low vision; digital consultant to Via Christi Health; and public relations consultant to numerous not-for-profit organizations and small businesses.

He has taught previously at Wichita State, Kansas State and Trinity University.

tkim18@luc.edu

Taeyoung Kim is an assistant professor of public relations in the School of Communication, Loyola University Chicago. Taeyoung is completing her PhD in the Media School (formerly the School of Journalism) at Indiana University.

Before seeking her PhD degree, she spent eight years working as a graduate researcher at Ewha Womans University as well as working as a PR practitioner at Fleishman-Hillard Korea. During the period of her career, Taeyoung has provided strategic communication and public relations counsel to both public- and private-sector organizations.

Her research interests include various topics in the field of public relations and strategic organizational communication including, but not limited to, dialogic communication, legitimacy management, social media effectiveness, and risk and crisis communication.

pmorris1@luc.edu
pamelakmorris.com

Pamela is an Associate Professor, Program Director of Advertising and Public Relations at Loyola University Chicago. She teaches Principles of Advertising, Research Methods, Capstone, Internships and others. She has also introduced team taught courses to reflect the real world of advertising, including Multi-Media Commercial Production and Design for Advertising and Public Relations.

Morris has an impressive academic and professional background. She has spent about 20 years in advertising and marketing communications and has worked in account management for Foote Cone & Belding, Los Angeles, DraftWorldwide, Chicago and at regional agencies and businesses leading prominent brands such as Universal Studios Tour, Mattel, and Kellogg’s. Her love of the field led her to pursue a Ph.D. in Mass Communications at the Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, New York. She also has an MBA from California State University, Long Beach.

Her research focus is on advertising visuals and culture and ethics, diversity, inclusion and equity in advertising practices and pedagogy. Morris has published work on gender in print and outdoor advertising around the globe and completed other research work on teaching.

Morris has a passion for traveling, classical music, opera, art, architecture and gardening.

uraja@luc.edu

Dr. Raja is an Assistant Professor of Advocacy and Social Change and is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose work centers on understanding society’s responses to complex socio-environmental problems. Ultimately, Dr. Raja seeks to advance knowledge on public engagement with climate change and to contribute to the mitigation of environmental and societal harm. To do so, she studies new mediums (Virtual Reality in particular) that show potential in capturing the public’s imagination. Her research further uses both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to understand how psychological distance—the perception that events, people, experiences, and places are physically or perceptually distant—relates to people’s engagement with climate change.

mrheu@luc.edu

Professor Minjin (MJ) Rheu studies and teaches the psychology of how people are influenced by media content, specifically their understanding of self, attitudes, and behavioral decisions. Her recent work focuses on applying psychological principles to the design of computer agents and artificial intelligence so that people can wisely use and build trust in these new technologies. She is also very interested in how these new technologies are changing how brands communicate with their customers and create a positive social impact. Before pursuing her Ph.D., she worked at an advertising agency in Korea (a local branch of J. Walter Thompson), working with wonderful, fun-loving clients such as Nike. She also loves learning and sharing different cultures with people with diverse backgrounds, as she believe the meaning of our life is in meeting good people and expand our horizons.

dtrielli@luc.edu

Daniel Trielli is an Assistant Professor of Journalism. He researches how news reaches the public in our increasingly algorithmically-defined world and how journalists can cover algorithms. As part of that overarching question, he is interested in data and computational journalism, media literacy, and algorithmic accountability. 

Dr. Trielli's research was published in Information, Communication & Society and the journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, and it was presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and the Computation + Journalism Symposium. He also occasionally writes about it in public-facing media both in the United States and Brazil.

Before his life in academia, he was a journalist for about a decade in his native country of Brazil, where he worked at a national newspaper, O Estado de S. Paulo and a regional newspaper, Diário do Grande ABC.

bvanacker@luc.edu

Bastiaan Vanacker, Ph.D.,(University of Minnesota, 2006) is an Associate Professor focusing on media ethics and law. Vanacker was named the program director for the School of Communication’s Center of Digital Ethics and Policy in Summer 2012, a title which he retained until 2020. He is also the former Chair of AEJMC’s Media Ethics Division.

Vanacker has authored or co-edited three books and guest edited one special issue of the Journal of Media Ethics. His research has won numerous awards at national conferences (including two best faculty papers at AEJMC’s annual conference) and has been published in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Journalism Studies, Journal of Information, Ethics and Information Technology and Convergence. He has also authored numerous book chapters. 

In addition to his scholarly work, he has also authored numerous articles for the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy and has been involved in the planning and organization of the center’s Annual Symposium on Digital Ethics and Policy and numerous other events hosted by the center. ​

jyang13@luc.edu

Jing Yang is an Assistant Professor of Digital Advertising in the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago. Before joining Loyola, Jing pursued her doctoral education at Michigan State University with a primary focus on digital marketing communications. With a strong passion and motivation in advancing today's digital advertising education, Jing incorporates both the latest digital technologies and her research findings into her course instructions. Tools for digital data analysis, search engine optimization and advertising, mobile app design and development, and social media advertising campaign management have all been introduced to her classroom. Her goal is to help students be equipped with not only a well-built knowledge base in digital advertising, but also a holistic and active mindset in innovating and creating new digital advertising methods and strategies. 

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