Dr. Stacks received his Ph.D. in communication studies from the University of Florida. He has earned numerous academic and professional awards for teaching and research. At the University of Miami his awards include “Professor of the Year” and “Provost’s Award for Scholarly Activity.” His professional recognitions include the three highest awards an academic can get from the public relations profession: the “Pathfinder Award” for programmatic research, the “Jackson Jackson and Wagner Award” for applied research, and the Public Relations Society of America’s “Educator of the Year” award. He was also named as a “Measurement Maven” by The Measurement Standard. In addition, Dr. Stacks was recently inducted into the first Research Fellows of the Institute for Public Relations, was elected an Eastern Communication Association Research Fellow in 2007 and most recently elected as an Eastern Communication Association Teaching Fellow in 2008, both awards are based on life-time accomplishments in communication.
Dr. Stacks’ background is based primarily in corporate/governmental public relations and consulting. He has authored and edited numerous books, book chapters, and articles. His most recent works are in the area of public relations measurement and evaluation and include the Primer of Public Relations Research (Guilford Press, now in its second edition) and the Dictionary of Public Relations Measurement and Research, which has been translated into several languages.
Dr. Stacks serves on a number of academic and professional review boards. He is a Trustee for the Institute for Public Relations, an elected member of the International Public Relations Association, and chairs the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication’s (AEJMC) Elected Standing Committee on Research and serves on the AEJMC Board of Directions. In addition, he is a member of the national Commission on Public Relations Measurement and Evaluation and former research chair for the Commission on Public Relations Education. He currently directs the nation’s largest public relations research conference, the International Public Relations Research Conference. He serves as a senior advisor to Echo Research, an international public relations/corporate communications research company and has consulted for top Fortune companies in matters ranging from communication audits to crisis management to marketing research.
Dr. Stacks’ research interests include crisis management, public relations theory and methodology, nonverbal communication, persuasion, intercultural communication, listening in the corporate environment, and biosocial/neurocommunication research.