Welcome to Desperately Seeking.
I am to share my scholarship, which focuses on media, inequality, and health, and also personal reflections on life in academia. Much of my research has centered Latinx populations in the US, and the process of becoming an academic has been one of reckoning with my own identity as a child immigrant; moreover, being successful in academia has involved negotiations with other important parts of my identity, including marriage and motherhood.
I’ve spent a lot of time digging deep into the literature on productivity, writing routines, pedagogy, and work-life balance—I hope my reflections can save you some time, or, at least, help you realize you are not alone in the struggle.
Please check out my past posts, where I share how I planned a one-year sabbatical, how the COVID-19 pandemic forced me to love technology in the classroom and the lessons I’m taking forward, and more about communication and health. I invite you to subscribe and to share Desperately Seeking with your network.
Who’s Desperately Seeking?
I am a professor of public health communication at a large public university in California. My driving motivation has always been to use communication to improve the human condition. I earned three degrees in communication: BA from Santa Clara University and MA and PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. I also earned a Master of Public Health (MPH) from Harvard University.
In the first phase of my career, I developed expertise in understanding and applying communication to influence individual- and organizational-level change. Before returning to academia, I honed these skills as a Change Management consultant in a global firm. In the academic world, my research has centered an interrogation of “culture” and acculturation processes in message effectiveness studies while also exploring how the misattribution of the effects of the information environment as cultural attributes contributes to health disparities. I’ve also theorized segmented assimilation as a mechanism to explain the dietary acculturation paradox.
In my current work, I focus on advancing understanding of policy discourse pertaining to population health. Building on a theoretical framework for racialized marketing, I examine the advocacy strategies employed by both public health scientists and multinational food and beverage corporations in their quest to influence policy and society.
In addition to my professional identities and work, I am a young GenX-er, a member of the 1.5 immigrant generation, a borderline INTJ/ISTJ, a Taurus, and a practicing social justice-oriented Catholic, all of which mean I am tenacious (stubborn if you want to be mean), fiercely loyal, and comforted by ritual. I am a mother to three children, and an imperfect wife and daughter.
