Congratulations to Tammy Afifi for receiving a UCSB Faculty Senate Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award! This award is highly competitive and recognizes sustained exemplary contributions in mentoring graduate students, both during their time at UCSB as well as in their subsequent careers (see https://senate.ucsb.edu/~awards/).
Communication Career Day is an annual professional development event for UCSB Communication students, featuring a career advice panel, alumni-student networking, and a departmental news update.
Each spring the UCSB Communication Alumni Council helps the Department sponsor Communication Career Day. On this day, dozens of alumni return to campus to participate in speed advice sessions that help our undergraduates gain insight into the variety of professions and diverse career paths chosen by our Communication alumni. This annual networking event brings 200+ Communication students together with alumni for career workshops, industry connections, and professional socializing. Students meet with alumni and receive one-on-one career guidance, learn from expert speakers, gain experience, and learn about opportunities as interns or employees, from student/alumni networking sessions.
See https://www.comm.ucsb.edu/news-events/annual/career-day for more information.
Students: Register (free) here: https://cglink.me/2dD/r2265636
Professor Norah Dunbar in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara has received a nearly $600,000 research grant from the U.S. Army Research Office to study how trust develops in teams and how it influences performance. The project is titled ”AI-based Characterization of Trust and Dominance for Team Performance.” Conducted in collaboration with researchers at the University of Southern California, the project will examine how subtle communication behaviors—such as nonverbal signals, interpersonal synchrony, and displays of dominance—shape trust among team members.
Although trust is widely recognized as essential for effective teamwork, scientists still do not fully understand how it forms or how it changes over time. Dunbar’s team will investigate these dynamics by observing teams working together across multiple sessions and by analyzing patterns in how people communicate verbally and nonverbally. The project will also develop new artificial intelligence tools that can automatically analyze team interactions, helping researchers identify behaviors that signal trust, influence, and cooperation. These tools may ultimately make it possible to measure complex team processes more accurately than ever before.
By combining communication theory with advanced machine learning methods, the research aims to produce new insights into how strong, effective teams are built and sustained. The findings may inform strategies for improving collaboration in high-stakes environments, from military operations to business, healthcare, and other team-based settings.
Rene Weber has been elected to become an inaugural Fellow of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS; https://socialaffectiveneuro.o
Dr. Maggie Pitts (Department of Communication, University of Arizona) will present “Savoring the Language of Lovers, Flovers, and Friends Why Relational Communication Still Matters”.
Dr. Shaunak Sastry is Professor of Communication and Inaugural Director of the Pahl Center for the Study of Critical Social Issues at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Dr. Sastry is the First Vice-President of the National Communication Association. His award-winning global health communication research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Waterhouse Family Institute, and the Center for Clinical & Translational Science and Training. His areas of research interests include pandemic governance, health impacts of climate change, and community-engaged health research. Sastry currently serves as Co-Director of the Community Engagement Core of the Cincinnati Center for Collaboration on Climate and Community for Health (C4H), which is an NIH-funded P20 research center dedicated to studying the interactions between extreme weather, climate change, and health. His work has been published in a range of top-ranked Communication journals, including the Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, Communication Theory, Health Communication, Journal of Health Communication, and so on. He has previously served as Senior Editor of the journal Health Communication, and sits on the editorial boards of several leading journals in Communication.
Ph.D. (2012), Purdue University, Communication
MBA (2006), Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, India, Communications Management
B.A. (2004), St. Xavier's College, University of Mumbai, India, Psychology
Alison Oliver, Alan Crawley, and Soumyajit have received a Top Paper Award at the 2026 HICSS. Their paper, titled "Mapping the Moral Foundations of Machines: A Vignette-Based Inquiry into Moral Reasoning Across Six Large Language Model Platforms" will be part of the Proceedings of the 59th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
Hannah will join Michigan State University to be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences beginning in Fall of 2026.
See the UCSB Current Article: “NIH backs UCSB virtual reality project to help older adults build real social connections”. The project will test “how virtual reality can support older adults who are aging at home — and the family members and professionals who care for them.”