Jane Daugherty, a second-year doctoral student, was an associate professor of journalism at Florida International University from 2004-2010. A newspaper investigative reporter and editor for nearly 30 years, she was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1994 for commentary and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She is a four-time winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for coverage of the disadvantaged, most recently in 2003 for “Modern-Day Slavery,” an investigative series on migrant labor, at the Palm Beach Post, and numerous other national journalism awards. Daugherty was named national Journalist of the Year in 2004 by judges from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California on behalf of the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Journalists for her contributions at the Miami Herald, Detroit Free Press, Austin (Tx.) American-Statesman, St. Petersburg Times and Palm Beach Post. She has a B.A. in mass communications and an M.S. in gerontology from the University of South Florida, where she was a Poynter Fellow. In 2011, she was a Peter Jennings Fellow at the National Constitution Center. At FIU, she taught multi-media journalism, law and ethics, print and online news reporting, research methods and data-based reporting. Her research interests include preservation of investigative reporting in the digital age, measuring veracity in political communication, media psychology and human trafficking.

Research

Classes Taught

Paola Pascual-Ferra is a third-year doctoral student in the School of Communication at the University of Miami, where she also teaches courses in Communication Theory, Public Speaking, and Intercultural Communication. Her areas of research include interpersonal, intercultural and political communication. Prior to being at UM, Paola taught courses in Understanding Media, Communication Theory, Public Relations, and Censorship and the Media in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, DC. From 2008-2009, she worked in the Office of Communications at the Federal Election Commission, offering guidance to the regulated community and leading agency outreach efforts during and after the 2008 Presidential election. She has over ten years of work experience, most of which she spent managing strategic communication programs in the private, non-profit and government sectors. She has worked both inside advertising and public relations agencies as well as on the client side. She has also volunteered her time to furthering education programs such as the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars, The Esperanza Education Fund, Take Stock in Children, and Language ETC, an organization offering affordable English-language education programs to immigrants. She has a master's in Public Communication from American University and a bachelor's in Political Science from Princeton University.

Publications:

Pascual-Ferrá, P., Liu, Y., & Beatty, M. J. (2012). A meta-analytic comparison of the effects of text messaging to substance-induced impairment on driving performance. Communication Research Reports, 29(3), 227-238. DOI: 10.1080/08824096.2012.696079

Jasmine Phillips is a doctoral student in the School of Communication, focusing on intercultural communication.  She has done research on campus internationalization to make recommendations on promoting friendships with international students on University of Miami’s campus.  She has also conducted research on minority students’ barriers to studying abroad and fostered opportunities for them to go abroad, as well as written on how to overcome monetary disincentives to studying abroad.  Previous to her current position, Phillips was Director of Education Abroad at Virginia Commonwealth University and also served as Assistant Director of International Education and Exchange Programs at University of Miami.  In both positions she expanded opportunities for educational exchange and study abroad.  Phillips also served as the Program Assistant for a youth development and exchange program based in Washington DC, where she led a group of high school students to Zambia for a cultural exchange program.  She has also worked at Youth for Understanding (a high school exchange program), the Institute for International Education, and the Embassy of Brazil in Washington, DC.

Phillips has conducted research, volunteered and studied abroad.  Her research abroad includes a project on land reform efforts in Zimbabwe, and she has volunteered with an elementary school in Lusaka, Zambia.  Phillips also studied abroad in Brazil, Germany and South Korea, beginning with a high school semester program in Salvador, Bahia.  

Phillips holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Yale University and a master’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University. In her ‘spare’ time, she likes to paint in the same style of the Miami-based artist Romero Britto.
 

Whitney Sessa is a first-year doctoral student in the University of Miami's Ph.D. in Communication program. She received a M.A. in Print Journalism from the University of Miami in 2009 and a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Florida in 2008. Prior to starting the doctoral program at UM, she worked as a communications coordinator for Barry University, providing media relations support to the university while also practicing internal communications as the editor for Barry's internal website BUCWIS, an online daily newsletter designed for faculty and staff. In addition to practicing media relations, Sessa has also worked as freelance writer for several South Florida publications, including The Miami Herald, the South Florida Times, and The Miami Times, and for the national online publication UPI.com.

Qinghua (Candy) Yang is a first year Ph.D. student at University of Miami, School of Communication. Her research interests mainly lie in health communication,computer-mediated communication, and communication technology especially from the multicultural perspective. She received her M.A. in Communication from Columbia University in the city of New York, and another M.A. in Translation and Cultural Studies from Beijing, China.