About Growing Up Comm
This podcast series - hosted by the Student and Early Career Advisory Council (SECAC) - seeks to present on a range of topics, those unique and not so unique to the student and early career experience around the world. Our esteemed guests have already and/or are currently navigating similar topics providing listeners with fun anecdotes, plenty of lessons learned, and even some laughs along the way. We hope this series will be valuable to all across the career spectrum!
About the co-hosts
Dan Andrew
Dan Andrew is a PhD candidate at the University of Canberra, where he lectures in communications and marketing communications, following on from a long career in advertising. Dan’s research examines the role of the advertising industry on the creation and circulation of cultural production and how audiences are created and traded. In particular, he is interested in the impact of the increasing dominance of digital communication technology on the advertising and media industries, as the media and audiences have become increasingly fragmented.
Chrissy Cook
Currently she is working under Prof. Dr. Tammy Jih-Hsuan Lin at National Chengchi University (NCCU) in their Department of Advertising as a postdoctoral researcher on a Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) grant they co-submitted on trolling victimology. She is also assisting with Prof. Dr. Lin’s continued work on her social grooming model, and has just become an adjunct assistant professor teaching in the Global Communication and Innovation Technology (GCIT) master’s program.
Arienne Ferchaud
Dr. Arienne Ferchaud (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, 2018) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Florida State University. Dr. Ferchaud's research focuses broadly on emerging media entertainment from a media psychology perspective. She is interested in how new media technologies change the way users engage with entertainment content. She has a special interest in narrative theory and how new modes of storytelling change how we perceive stories.
Sarah Pila-Leiderman
Sarah is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She earned her doctorate in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University, working in the Center on Media and Human Development. Her research interests focus on the benefits of prosocial and educational media for young children, particularly in early childhood education.
Lara Schreurs
Lara Schreurs is a PhD Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Leuven School for Mass Communication Research (KU Leuven) under supervision of Professor Laura Vandenbosch. Lara’s empirical PhD work aims to test the principles of the theoretical SMILE-model that she developed together with her supervisor. This model aims to move the fast-developing literature on social media literacy forward by researching a first area of relevance for social media literacy: the positivity bias. Specifically, Lara seeks to understand how social media literacy concerning the positivity bias on social media develops and/or exerts a protective function.
Cecilia Zhou
Yuxi (Cecilia) Zhou is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her current research broadly focuses on examining the role of media and technology in adolescents’ lives as well as media literacy education. Her dissertation will examine the role of culture and parenting style in children’s media use at home, how these factors interact with children’s own agencies and experiences with media use and how they influence the online opportunities and risks children have.