Global health postdoc receives award for health communication dissertation

 

Sherine El-Toukhy, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the Gillings School of Global Public Health’s Office of Global Health, has received the 2013 Health Communication Dissertation of the Year Award, presented by the International Communication Association (ICA) and the National Communication Association (NCA).

 

Jane Brown, PhD, James L. Knight Professor in the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, fellow emerita of UNC’s Carolina Population Center, and El-Toukhy’s dissertation committee chair, praised El-Toukhy’s research as “beautifully written, masterful – [work] that integrates new theoretical and methodological perspectives from psychology with behavior change theories and risk communication to examine how people arrive at personal health risk perceptions.”The dissertation, “Priming Optimism: The Automaticity of Health Risk Perceptions,” aimed to understand why people underestimate the possibility of experiencing illness and how severe they believe their illnesses would be if they were to experience them. The work contributes to the field of health communication by offering explanations for health decision-making processes and informing risk message design, implementation and evaluation.

El-Toukhy, who received a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement grant from the Decision, Risk and Management Science Program to support her research, will receive a plaque at ICA’s annual conference in London and a cash award at NCA’s annual conference in Washington, D.C.

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Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: David Pesci, director of communications, (919) 962-2600 or dpesci@unc.edu.