CPC-Faculty Bios
Register here for the 2020 Cohort - July 19th - 24th, 2020
Faculty for the Certified Public Communicator™ Program
Dr. Jacqueline Lambiase, strategic communication faculty member in TCU’s Department of Strategic Communication in the Bob Schieffer College of Communication, directs the Certified Public Communicator™ Program at TCU and serves on its advisory board. She and many of their faculty colleagues are teaching in the residential program, which started in July 2013.
PROGRAM DIRECTOR
Jacqueline Lambiase, Ph.D.
Jacqueline Lambiase, Ph.D., is a professor of strategic communication in the Bob Schieffer College of Communication. She is co-director with Dr. Laura Bright of the Certified Public Communicator™ program at TCU, in partnership with the Texas Association of Municipal Information Officers and the National Association of County Information Officers. She teaches writing, research, ethics, case studies, and advocacy.
For 10 years, she has consulted with or spoken to diverse groups about earning their share of discussion in social media and public relations opportunities, including TAMIO, 3CMA, the Texas Municipal League, the Texas City Management Association, the Dallas Regional Chamber, communicators with the City of Austin, managers for the cities of Abilene and San Angelo, Children’s Medical Center-Dallas, the American Heart Association, Texas Instruments, and UT-Southwestern Medical Center. She is co-founder of the DFW/TCU Nonprofit Communicators Conference, now in its sixth year.
Her research focuses on public relations ethics, social media, and representations of gender and sexuality in media and marketing. She has co-authored and co-edited two scholarly collections, as well as published more than 30 book chapters and refereed journal articles. Before her life as an academic, she served as spokeswoman for an East Coast electric utility and worked as a wire editor, business reporter and news editor for daily newspapers in Texas.
PROGRAM FACULTY
Lisa Albert
Lisa Albert has experience in agency, non-profit, higher education and corporate strategic communications experience. After completing her undergraduate work at TCU, Albert began her career with Stuart Bacon Ad Agency where she served as an assistant account executive. She then transitioned to the YMCA of Metropolitan Fort Worth where she worked as a marketing specialist before opening her own business, Cheer & Tumble Factory. The cheerleading school provided an outlet for her passion, and allowed her to gain firsthand business knowledge and how to market to gain customers. After 4 years of business ownership, Albert closed the business to return to full time work at TCU in the office of strategic communications. She worked her way up in the department and was named director in 2009, shortly after earning a masters degree in strategic communications at TCU. In fall of 2014, Albert transitioned to a new role leading the communications team at Justin Brands, Inc., a Berkshire-Hathaway owned company.
With much experience in crisis communications and media relations, Albert enjoys sharing with students the information she has been fortunate enough to compile over the years. She enjoys bringing real world experience and examples to the students, making the textbook theories come to life.
Johny Garner, Ph.D.
Johny Garner is associate professor of communication studies and specializes in organizational communication. His primary research interests involve how employees and supervisors communicate with each other and how that communication can be improved. He also examines dissent, suggestions, and feedback in nonprofit organizations and churches. Dr. Garner is a member of the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association. He was recently awarded the 2009 B. Aubrey Fisher award for top article in Western Journal of Communication. His research has also been published in Journal of Applied Communication Research, Management Communication Quarterly, and other academic journals.
Amiso George, Ph.D.
Amiso M. George is an associate professor of strategic communication and former director of the strategic communication graduate program. She developed and taught the first course in crisis communication and was director of the public relations program at the Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevada in Reno. She also taught at the University of Texas San Antonio. George’s teaching, research and consulting interests areas include public relations, corporate communication and issues management, risk and crisis communication.
George is Accredited in Public Relation (APR) and a PRSA Fellow. George spent part of summer 2012 as a Plank Public Relations Fellow in the Corporate Communications Department at USAA, a Fortune 500 financial services company, based in San Antonio, Texas, where she also conducted a workshop on crisis communication. In fall 2012, she was a visiting associate professor of strategic communication at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, where she led tutorials on issues, risk and crisis communication.
George is the winner of three Worthy (professional PRSA) awards and an advisor to the award winning TCU Bateman (public relations) team. She received a Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award at University of Texas San Antonio, the Stephen H. Coltrin Award for Excellence in Communication Education, from the International Radio and Television Society Foundation, and the Best of Texas award for her student teams at the Texas Public Relations Association (TPRA) Student Case Study Competition.
George has presented papers on public relations and crisis communication at national and international conferences and has published journal articles and book chapters in the same area. She is the co-editor of two books: Case Studies in Crisis Communication: International Perspective on Hits and Misses (Routledge/Taylor Francis, 2012) and Race, Gender and Other Minorities: Readings for Professional Communicators (Cognella, 2012). She also serves as an editor for Sage Open Access (online) journal and is on the editorial board of Journal of African Communication.
Glenn Griffin, Ph.D.
W. Glenn Griffin, Ph.D., teaches courses in creativity and portfolio development at The University of Colorado in Boulder, CO.
His research on creativity, education and social responsibility has appeared in the Journal of Advertising, the Journal of Advertising Education and Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, among other publications. In September 2010, his first book (with co-author Deborah Morrison), The Creative Process Illustrated: How Advertising’s Big Ideas Are Born (HOW Books) was published.
His students’ work has been featured in both national and international press, including Advertising Age, Adweek and CMYK magazines and recognized by The One Club for Art & Copy, the Art Directors Club of New York and the Clio Awards, among many other organizations.
He is a frequent speaker at professional and academic conferences on the topics of creativity, advertising education and social responsibility.
Beth Henkel
Beth Henkel is a writer and video producer, helping organizations with video messaging and content for the web, social media and other channels. Her experience includes producing videos for cities, school districts, hospital systems and non-profits. She began her career as a television news producer, working at stations in Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and the DFW area, and translated those skills to meet the needs of changing media.
Beth and her husband Al, a television journalist, live in Arlington where they raised three sons.
Kathryn Holliday, Ph.D.
Kate Holliday is an architectural historian whose research and teaching focuses on the built environment in American cities. Her background is in architecture, art history, and environmental studies and she brings this interdisciplinary approach to the classroom and to her writing. Since joining UTA in fall of 2007 she has published two books, Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Gilded Age (W. W. Norton, 2008) and Ralph Walker: Architect of the Century (Rizzoli, 2012). She has lectured widely on her work in public venues like the 92nd Street Y and the Skyscraper Museum in New York and the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, as well as at universities and academic conferences.
She is currently at work on several projects, including a history of telephone buildings since the invention of commercial telephone service by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and an examination of the postwar boom in architecture in the suburban landscape of Dallas and Fort Worth in the 1960s and 1970s. Her current research on telephone buildings is featured in the new short film “Urban Giants: The Telecom Palaces of Ralph Walker,” which can be viewed on Vimeo here.
As Director of the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture, she coordinates a yearly symposium each spring and directs student research projects documenting the history of urban growth in north Texas. The Center’s growing Oral History of Texas Architecture Project serves as a repository for the memory of the design profession in the region.
Dr. Holliday also serves on the editorial board for Columns magazine, AIA Dallas’s quarterly publication and on the State Board of Review for the Texas Historical Commission’s National Register programs. She is also a former member of the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education. Her work has been supported by grants from the Hagley Library, the Nasher Foundation, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
Sarah Maben, Ph.D.
Sarah Maben, PhD, is an assistant professor in the communication studies department at Tarleton State University, where she teaches media writing and public relations. Her research agenda includes experiential learning in communication programs, public relations education, media ethics, and social media in the classroom. She is co-director for the Texas Social Media Research Institute (www.tarleton.edu/tsmri) and editor of The Journal of Social Media in Society (thejsms.org).
Wendy Macias, Ph.D.
Wendy Macias, assistant professor of advertising, joined the strategic communications faculty in the Schieffer School in the fall of 2010 to teach advertising and public relations courses including, research methods, campaigns and channel planning. From August 2000 through July 2010, she was an associate professor of advertising at the University of Georgia.
Her research focuses on health communications including direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising as well as how consumers use and interact with online communications. Dr. Macias’ refereed articles have been published in Journal of Advertising, Journal of Health Communications, Health Communication, Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising and Health Marketing Quarterly. She has presented her work at dozens of national conferences and served as a reviewer for several national journals of advertising, journalism and health communication.
Before her life as an academic, Dr. Macias worked in sales promotion, market research and marketing. She continues to strive to bring industry experience into the classroom by collaborating with her advertising agency contacts.
Julie O’Neil, Ph.D.
Julie O’Neil, associate professor and director of the Schieffer School graduate program, teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in public relations, research and evaluation, and corporate social responsibility. In recent years, Dr. O’Neil and her students have assisted Roma Boots, Tarrant County Public Health, the American Heart Association, Justin Boots, and the American Cancer Society as her students apply what they are learning in class to contemporary scenarios.
Her areas of expertise include measuring and evaluating communication programs and public relationships. She has published a dozen research articles in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Public Relations Research, Public Relations Review, Journal of Promotion Management, Public Relations Journal, and the Journal of Nonprofit and Public Sector Marketing, among others. In 2008, she and a public relations colleague won the first-ever Jackson-Sharpe Award for her research on the internal communication strategy of a global firm titled Measuring the Impact of Employee Communication. The Jackson-Sharpe award is given in recognition of the best scholarly research that bridges the gap between public relations scholarship and practice.
Dr. O’Neil currently serves on the Measurement Commission of the Institute for Public Relations that exists to establish standards and methods for public relations research and measurement and to issue best-practices white papers. In 2013, she co-authored a research paper that measured the reliability of traditional media standards, and in 2012, she wrote a pedagogical white paper called Resources for Public Relations Educators For Teaching Research, Measurement, and Evaluation.
She is a former president of a Toastmasters club and a former board member of both the Greater Fort Worth and San Antonio chapters of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). She currently serves on the editorial board of the Public Relations Journal, and serves as an ad-hoc reviewer for the Journal of Communication Management, Public Relations Review, and the Journal of Public Relations Research. Dr. O’Neil is a member of the Association for Education and Journalism in Mass Communication and the Greater Fort Worth chapter of PRSA.
Prior to becoming a professor and researcher, Dr. O’Neil worked for about 10 years in public relations and marketing in multiple settings: agency, corporate, and nonprofit. Today, she periodically consults with organization on ways to cost-effectively measure and evaluate their communication programs.
Tracey Rockett, Ph.D.
Tracey is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice at Texas Christian University. She currently teaches Organizational Management at the undergraduate and graduate levels and a Strategic Human Resource Management class for undergrads. Tracey was awarded the Core Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2013.
She also serves as the Neeley Honors Faculty Associate Director. In her role as Neeley Honors Faculty Associate Director she is responsible for Neeley Fellows mentoring, implementing the FROG critical thinking model into Neeley Fellows courses, and chairing the Neeley Fellows Academic Leadership Committee.
Previously Tracey was on the faculty of the School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. In that position she served as the founding Director of the OBHR (Organizational Behavior & Human Resource Management) Program, the Director of the Management Honors Program and a SIFE Sam Walton Fellow.
Tracey earned a B.S. in Psychology from Texas A&M University and a Ph.D. in International Management Studies from UT Dallas. She has earned multiple awards for outstanding teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate levels and for teaching online. Her current research focuses on betrayal, familiarity in groups, and the effects of conflict on team processes and performance. In addition to teaching, she often gives talks to businesses and community groups on topics such as communication, power, and gender in the workplace.
Areas of specialization: organizational politics, online education, conflict, social networking, personal branding, women in the workplace, building relationships, and team development.
James “Jim” Seeley
Jim Seeley serves as the Emerging Technologies Manager for the School of Journalism in the Bob Schieffer College of Communication. He provides media production and technical support to the students, faculty and staff. He is also responsible for maintaining the studio space and media equipment of the school.
Before joining the School of Journalism, he helped create and launch a national cable network, Sportsman Channel, and served as its director of programming operations for the first eight and a half years of its existence. He also spent many years traveling across the country and around the world producing and editing outdoor television content.
Chip Stewart, Ph.D.
Daxton R. “Chip” Stewart is an attorney and journalist who joined the Schieffer School faculty in 2008. Dr. Stewart primarily teaches courses in law and ethics of mass communication, but he has also taught media writing and editing, public affairs reporting, graduate proseminar and other courses.
He has nearly 20 years of professional experience as a journalist, including stints as a city editor and columnist at the Columbia Missourian and editor-in-chief of Dispute Resolution Magazine. He has been licensed to practice law in both Texas and Missouri, working in both local government and general practice in central Texas from 1998 to 2000.
Dr. Stewart’s research has focused on media law, most recently examining the challenges journalists and strategic communicators face when using social media. He edited Social Media and the Law: A Guidebook for Communication Students and Professionals (Routledge, 2012) and has published several articles on media law topics such as digital copyright, libel on Twitter, judicial contempt power in reporter confidentiality cases, and freedom of information laws.
Dr. Stewart’s research earned him a nomination for the Dean’s Research Award at TCU in 2011. His paper on copyright and fair use regarding photographs posted on Facebook won the Top Faculty Paper Award in the Law & Policy Division of AEJMC in 2011. That same year, his paper on social media policies for professional communicators was awarded the Third Place Faculty Paper in the Communication Technology Division of AEJMC. In 2010, his paper on designing public access ombuds offices received the Second Place Faculty Paper Award in the Law & Policy Division.
Dr. Stewart is a frequent speaker on media law topics to local and national organizations. He moderated and spoke on a panel at South by Southwest Interactive 2012 in Austin on Intellectual Property Issues in Social Media.
In his time at TCU, Dr. Stewart has served as faculty adviser for Kappa Tau Alpha, the national journalism honors association; director of the TCU High School Journalism Workshop, sponsored by the Dow Jones News Fund, since 2008; co-founding editor of Community Journalism, an online, peer-reviewed journal that published its first issue in 2012; and he currently serves in leadership of the Law & Policy Division of AEJMC as the research chair.