Rachel D. Davidson successfully defended her dissertation entitled, “Rhetorical Lessons in Advocacy and Shared Responsibility: Family Metaphors and Definitions of Crisis and Care in Unpaid Family Caregiving Advocacy Rhetoric.” She accepted a position as Visiting Assistant Professor at Hanover College in Indiana.

For the 2015-2016 academic year, Lindsey Harness has accepted a full-time position as Assistant Professor of Communication in the newly formed Communication and Technology department at Alverno College, a women’s only college located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The curriculum at Alverno is based on eight abilities and privileges assessment-as-learning methods for students.

Kristopher Heindel successfully defended his Master’s thesis, “Relationship-based Care: A Test of the Quality Caring Model.”

Thomas Salek was competitively selected to participate in the National Communication Association’s Doctoral Honors Seminar “Solving Social Problems through Communication Research,” held July 16-19 at the University of Missouri. This year’s selection process was highly competitive, with 34 participants selected from the nearly 100 applications that were received in three areas – Communication & Social Science, Mass Media, and Rhetoric.

Erik Timmerman is co-organizer (with Phil Salem from Texas State University) of a conference called, Organizational Communication Traditions, Transitions, and Transformations that will take place from February 11-16, 2016 in Austin Texas. The conference will begin with three days of workshops that focus upon applications of organizational communication concepts. These sessions will be attended primarily by working professionals and facilitated by leading organizational communication scholars. The following three days focus upon scholarly research and consist of a set of five panels consisting of current work in the field. These panels will be chaired by organizational communication scholars Tim Kuhn, Paul Leonardi, Rebecca Meisenbach, Keri Stephens, and Sarah Tracy. The deadline for submitting papers is September 20, 2015.