This paper won both the Top Student Paper Award and Top Paper Award from the 2024 (Australia) ICA Computational Methods Division: Malik, M., Youk, S., Hopp, F. R., Curry, O. S., Cheong, M., Alfano, M., & Weber, R. (2024). The Extended Morality as Cooperation Dictionary: A Crowd-Sourced Approach via the Moral Narrative Analyzer Platform. International Communication Association (ICA), Gold Coast, Australia.

Howie Giles and co-author were given the 2024 JLSP Biennial Outstanding Paper Award for Maguire, E. R., & Giles, H. (2022). Public expressions of empathy and sympathy by US criminal justice officials after controversial police killings of African-Americans. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 41(1), 49-75.

Linda Putnam has been elected a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a huge honor, extremely difficult to achieve. The Academy of Management is a 19,000 member organization from 110 countries. The Fellows Group recognizes and honors members of AoM who have made significant contributions to the science and practice of management. They have a screening committee that vets nominations before they send it out to all the Fellows (250 active Fellows). Nominees have to receive a 60% confirmation vote from the 250 Fellows.

Seven of the Department of Communication members win Top Paper Award from the Mass Communication Division, International Communication Association (ICA), Gold Coast, Australia. Utom, C., Lundstedt, J. L., Woodman, K., Belinfante, J., Nelson, M., Youk, S., & Weber, R. (2024). Unraveling the ties between problematic social media use, emotion regulation, and psychological well-being. The four undergraduate Comm students worked on this paper as RAs in the Media Neuroscience Lab.

Veronica Wilson was acknowledged with the 2024 GSA Excellence in Teaching Award. The GSA Excellence in Teaching Award (ETA) recognizes graduate students who have shown excellence and gone above and beyond as teaching assistants or teaching associates at UC Santa Barbara.

Veronica Wilson is the recipient of the 2024 Dixon-Levy Graduate Student Association Service Award.  “This prestigious award will be given to outstanding members of the university community who have unselfishly devoted themselves to the improvement of graduate student life. Contributions to graduate life should extend beyond what is deemed appropriate to everyday work or civic service responsibilities.” https://gsa.ucsb.edu/awards/dixon-levy-gsa-service-award

Also, Veronica’s Mental Health First Aid team won the 2024 William J. Villa Service to Students Award this year, co-sponsored by Housing and Residential Services, and Student Affairs. This year she personally hosted a total of 4 trainings for the team and certified 88 students (undergrad and grad), staff and faculty on campus in Mental Heath First Aid. “The Villa Award is intended to recognize a department/unit that consistently strives for excellence in its support for students and displays approachability, flexibility, availability, openness to innovation, and teamwork.” https://www.sa.ucsb.edu/getman/VillaApplication.aspx 

In Academic Year 2022-2023, Dr. Jennifer Kam’s project, "Communication in Support of Separated Latina/o/x Families: From Research to Policy and Practical Implications" was awarded the UCSB Division of Social Science's Pahl Initiative for the Study of Critical Issues Research Grant. As part of that, two of the "Pahl Scholars" were selected to do a follow-up set of public-facing short videos. Jennifer was one of those two and the videos are now available for distribution. The videos can be viewed here:

Chapter 1: The Idea