Renee Houston ( Ph.D., The Florida State University) is an engaged communication teacher/scholar focused on developing stigma-based approaches to understanding social identity inequities that inform psychological and communication theory as well as organizational policy and practice. She’s also interested in identifying and implementing organizational practices that support employee empowerment, collaboration, and healthy work lives. Because her work engages the community, she’s committed to social learning practices that decenter expertise and create space for open, respectful, and collaborative solutions. As a lifelong advocate of whole-person approaches, Renee’s courses focus on exploring emotion, work-life and well-being, alternative organizing, and social identities in organizational contexts. Using a social learning approach to teaching she seeks to bring voice, connection, and justice to her students that inspires them to seek their life's purpose with skills, confidence, and joy. She is also an experienced higher education administrator with an extensive background in mentoring, program development, and education technology. Most recently, she developed several programs designed to provide key experiences that help college students move toward career choices. Her work was recognized with an award from the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Erick Garcia (He/Him/Él) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

His primary line of research focuses on online hate (i.e., hate speech, cyberhate, digital hate), spanning topics such as explicit and implicit hate messages, dog whistles, hate-driven memes, prejudice, stereotypes, systemic discrimination, and other forms of identity-based hostility communicated through digital media (e.g., racism, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, misogyny, and sexism).

Within online hate, his research examines three primary lines of inquiry: (1) theoretically driven approaches to understanding how intergroup solidarity may motivate bystander intervention (e.g., counter-speech) across group boundaries (with particular attention to the social identity approach in explaining how shared or recategorized identities may foster intra-minorirty solidarity across groups targeted by online hate); (2) the social, psychological, and mediated processes that contribute to the continued propagation and perpetuation of online hate; and (3) the structural, historical, and contextual conditions that shape how hate is produced (by haters), experienced (by targets), and addressed in digitally mediated environments.

Beyond his primary research program, he also maintains a personal scholarly interest in theoretically examining how digitally mediated environments shape broader social and psychological processes (viz. social/personal identity, cognition, agency, and the formation of the self). Drawing from meta-theoretical perspectives on structuration, time-space distanciation, and liminality, he is particularly interested in how individuals exercise agency to negotiate identities and navigate shifting boundaries between social structures across increasingly blurred online and offline contexts.

His scholarship has been recognized nationally, including a Top Paper Award from the Group Communication Division (2025) at the National Communication Association (NCA), and has been published in internationally recognized journals such as the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction.

Ismaharif Ismail is a doctoral candidate whose research broadly examines group processes, intergroup relations, and social identities in communication. His recent research focuses on how communication technologies are transforming intergroup communication and shaping broader intergroup dynamics. He uses a multimethod approach spanning laboratory experiments, longitudinal studies, fieldwork interventions, big-team science, latent variable modeling, and Monte Carlo simulations.

Ismaharif has published in leading journals across communication, psychology and the broader social sciences, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Computers in Human Behavior, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Political Psychology, and Human Communication Research. His research has received international recognition, including top paper awards from the International Communication Association (2020, 2025), Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (2018), and National Communication Association (2026). He has also received university and departmental recognition through the UCSB Regents Fellowship and Putnam Interdisciplinary Scholar Award. His research has been supported by external funding from sources including the MOE-START Scheme and DSO National Laboratories, as well as internal funding such as UCSB’s African and Asian Students in STEM Scholarship.

Margot Plunkett is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Margot’s research focalizes employee experiences to understand the communicative mechanisms through which organizational practices and expectations shape employee wellbeing. Her work explores control, organizational socialization, and the workplace experiences of stigmatized populations. She also examines how emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, are transforming workplace processes of connection, identity, and expertise. Across her research, Margot is interested in the everyday communicative practices through which organizational expectations become embedded in employees’ experiences and relationships at work. Her work has appeared in Human Communication Research, Qualitative Research in Organizing and Management, and Humanistic Management Journal.

Sofia Cavaness is a doctoral student in Organizational Communication. Her research examines how intergenerational interactions shape the way officers navigate organizational socialization in law enforcement, contributing to theory on identity formation, role negotiation, and knowledge transfer in high-reliability organizations. 

Law enforcement offers a high-stakes window into a challenge facing many professions: how do organizations manage members who hold differing beliefs about what the work should demand of them, and how do those interactions shape organizational culture?

Grounded in fieldwork, Sofia currently studies how mentorship shapes law enforcement agency dynamics and how knowledge is passed from veterans to newer officers. She works collaboratively with law enforcement agencies, with her research designed to understand what shapes sustainable careers in policing, and what gets in the way. 

Prateekshit (pruh-TEEK-shit), who goes by Kanu (kuh-noo), is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at UCSB, and specializes in political communication. His active research program uses computational methods (e.g. network analysis), survey experiments, and neuroimaging techniques to investigate the effects of political entertainment, especially humor and satire, on democratic participation, news sharing, and individual political agency, with comparative focus between the United States and South Asian contexts. On various aspects of this program, he has led and collaborated on several online experimental surveys and neuropsychological studies with fluency in advanced computational analyses (R, Python), as well as peer-reviewed publications in broad interest journals including Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, and field-specific journals such as Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, and Health Psychology. Before joining UCSB, Kanu completed his Ph.D. in the Summer of 2022 at the Annenberg School for Communication at UPenn, where he was also a postdoctoral fellow, appointed jointly between the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. Complementing his academic work on humor, Kanu is also a professional improvisational comedian. Between 2019 and 2023, he was part of ensembles at Comedy Sportz Philadelphia, where he performed and taught improvisational comedy.

Qiyao treats generative AI as three things at once: a research instrument, an object of audience judgment, and a collaborator in message production. Drawing on theories of emotion, persuasion, and media effects, she examines how emotional dynamics, multimodal message features, and AI personalization shape audience attention, psychological reactance, and behavioral intentions.

Her methodological expertise spans experimental design, LLM annotation, natural language processing, computer vision, eye-tracking, and neurophysiological measurement. She applies these approaches to health promotion and substance use prevention, with support from NIH- and NSF-funded projects.

Her work advances video as data and image as data as methodological contributions to communication research, making the emotional arc of persuasive media a measurable, designable variable and helping build a science of credibility for synthetic content. Recognized with awards from AEJMC, NCA, and SRNT, her research aims to provide data-driven guidance for designing effective health messages in the AI era.