I am an international interdisciplinary scholar. My research and teaching have been shaped by both my education and professional experience in advertising, journalism, and public relations. My overarching focus is media multitasking, an interest that I have long held and am continuing to pursue. I earned my bachelor’s degree in International Journalism at Rostov State University (part of Southern Federal University since 2006) in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, where I also worked as a communications manager and newsletter editor for a retail company and staff and freelance reporter for multiple newspapers. I developed interest in media effects research while doing my master’s degree at Oklahoma State University as a Fulbright scholar. I was particularly interested in how people in different cultures and societies used media and how their media use shaped the perceptions of the world. In my dissertation (University of Missouri, 2010), I investigated whether media distraction interfered with forming impressions of news story characters that represented racially minoritized populations. My dissertation work shaped my interest in media multitasking and its effects on information processing and decision making, especially in the persuasive communication context.
Currently, I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations (College of Communication Arts & Sciences) at Michigan State University where I do research in three areas: media and technology use across different cultures and social groups (e.g., age groups); psychological responses to media devices and persuasive messages; and advertising and digital literacy.
Throughout my career at Michigan State, I have been fortunate to teach undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral courses. I continuously teach Media Planning and Strategy undergraduate course in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations and Audience Analytics course for master's students in MSU's Strategic Communication online program. In Fall 2020, my colleagues and I developed and taught a course Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Advertising and Public Relations that became one of the first courses in advertising and PR curricula across universities to touch upon positive change and social justice in communication industries. For three years, I taught a doctoral seminar, Media Theory, that serves as an introduction to theories of media, communication, and information studies and covers a broad range of scholarly approaches from media psychology to critical theory and cultural studies. I also taught Social Marketing master's-level course for several semesters.
Currently, I serve as Graduate Director overseeing the master's program in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations and part of the Information & Media doctoral program in the College of Communication Arts & Sciences at MSU.