Leadership

Executive Committee

Officers and representatives for the organization are elected every two years at the Annual General Meeting (AGM), which is typically held at IALSP's biannual conference. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2022 elections and AGM were held virtually.  The Executive Committee meets monthly or bi-monthly (as circumstances require) to address issues related to the organization and to assist in planning the organization's biannual conference.

If you have a query for a specific officer or representative, you are welcome to contact them directly. If you have a general question for the Executive Committee, please email: ialsp.exec@gmail.com.

Officers

President: Jessica Gasiorek

Jessica Gasiorek is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Communicology Program in the School of the Communication and Information at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. She was introduced to IALSP at its 2012 conference in Leeuwarden, and then helped organize the following conference, ICLASP14, in Honolulu, HI in 2014.  Her research focuses on communication processes, such as how people process and produce messages, how people adapt and adjust for one another, and how people create understanding, and the social and cognitive consequences that follow from these processes. She is also interested in the role of communication in people’s collective ideas about age and aging, and the implications this has for social dynamics, social evaluations, and people’s subjective well-being. Her published work includes both book chapters and empirical articles on perceptions of communication accommodation and nonaccommodation, understanding, and communication about age and aging.

Immediate Past President:

Liz Jones

Liz Jones, PhD (Uni of Qld), is Head of Department of Psychology at Monash Malaysia. Her research interests are in an intergroup approach to health and organisational communication, and has used Communication Accommodation Theory in a number of her studies. She is interested in both health practitioner-patient communication and interprofessional practice, with a particular interest in giving voice to those from non-dominant groups. She also studies communication during organisational change. She has a strong interest in the translation of research for communication skills training and improvements in healthcare delivery. She was co-lead of the first AASP-IALSP Small Group meeting in 2019.  She has been on the IALSP Executive since 2006. She was previously Chair of the Intergroup Communication Interest group for International Communication Association and co-chaired the Health Communication taskforce for IALSP.  She was President from 2018 to 2022. 

Secretary: Katherine Collins

Katherine (Katie) A. Collins (PhD; University of Ottawa) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan, Canada, where she conducts research on the issues of language, culture, and identity. She has studied, for example, the role of linguistic bias in the transmission, maintenance, and formation of beliefs. This work has improved understanding of how cultural knowledge, like stereotypes, might become shared implicitly through interpersonal conversations. She strives to conduct research that is meaningful and relevant to socio-cultural issues. Given this and her métis ancestry, she is interested in researching these same issues, particularly identity, with Indigenous peoples in Canada. 


Treasurer: Yan Bing Zhang

Dr. Yan Bing Zhang is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. Dr. Zhang studies the ways in which cognitive schemas, societal norms and values, and media representations of groups relate to communication processes. She also studies the influence that direct, extended, or mediated intergroup and intercultural contact has on interpersonal relationships and intergroup attitudes. Her publications have appeared in some U.S. and international journals in communication and social psychology including Journal of Communication, Communication Monographs, New Media & Society, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, and Journal of Language and Social Psychology. Dr. Zhang has chaired the Communication and Aging Division of the National Communication Association, and currently serves on the editorial boards of a few communication journals. Dr. Zhang has been a member of IALSP for years.

Communications: Rachyl Pines

Rachyl Pines is a behavioral health Research Scientist at Cottage Health Research Institute. Rachyl completed a postdoctoral research fellowship with the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation for the Transplant Education and Resource Center (TREC) specializing in healthcare communication. She received both her MA in Communication in 2016, and her PhD in Communication in April 2020, from University of California, Santa Barbara. Rachyl has served as the lead on several multi-national research projects, helped hospital and health care systems to improve their provider-patient communication, and implemented organizational change and trainings on communication best practices. Her dissertation focused on training healthcare staff to better communicate with aggressive patients to prevent violence and improve patient experience using Communication Accommodation. At Cottage Health, Rachyl focuses on research to improve population health and patient-centered care. 


Publicity: Marko Dragojevic

Marko Dragojevic is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Kentucky. He studies language and interpersonal/intergroup communication. In particular, his research focuses on the communicative significance of linguistic variation – that is, differences in language use, including the use of different accents, dialects, and languages. His research tries to answer three broad questions: (1) How do we evaluate different language varieties and the speakers who use them? (2) How do those evaluations influence our own and others’ communicative behavior? (3) What are the cognitive and affective processes underlying those effects? He pursues these questions in three related lines of research: language attitudes, linguistic accommodation, and linguistic framing in persuasion. His recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Human Communication Research, Language in Society, and Journal of Health Communication

Regional Representatives

Africa: Elvis ResCue

Elvis ResCue (PhD) is a lecturer at the Department of English of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. He holds PhD and MA in Applied Linguistics from Aston University, Birmingham- UK, and BA degree in Linguistics with English from the University of Ghana, Legon. His research interests and expertise lie in the area of African Linguistics, Language Policy and Planning, Discourse Analysis, Language Contact, Sociolinguistics, Language and New Media, and General Linguistics. He has published on monolingual and multilingual media of instruction in multilingual contexts with a focus on Ghana in West Africa, and has also published on the use of minority languages in new media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. His publications appeared in the Ghana Journal of Linguistics, Current Issues in Language Planning, Applied Linguistics Review, Journal of Linguistics and has also published a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of African Linguistics, and other chapters published by Multilingual Matters and John Benjamins. He has served as an executive member on several international associations such as the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL), Linguistics Association of Ghana (LAG), and the BAAL Language in Africa – Special Interest Group. 

Asia: Margo Turnbull

Margo Turnbull (PhD) is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Communication at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Margo is interested in health communication and how ideas of health are developed across the lifespan in response to a wide variety of social, economic, and personal factors. Her current research is focussed on communication at the end-of-life and health and well-being amongst migrant workers in Asia. 

Asia: Blair Jin

Blair Ying Jin works as a Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of English and Communication, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is primarily interested in health communication, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and social media discourse. Her published work includes empirical articles and book chapters on doctor-patient interactions, parent-child interactions, and social media discourse. Her publications have appeared in international journals on linguistics such as Applied Linguistics, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Discourse Studies, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Journal of Pragmatics, Chinese Language and Discourse, Communication & Medicine.

 


Australia & Oceania: 

Sarah Choi

 Sarah Choi is a PhD student in Psychology at Massey University, New Zealand. Her research spans the fields of social, political, cultural and cross-cultural psychology as well as interdisciplinary work. Her specific research interests are situated within the areas of collective memory and identity, taking a social representations and narrative approach. Currently, she is studying popular constructions of historical narratives and their implications across cultural/national contexts. Her published work includes book chapters and empirical articles which have appeared in journals including Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Memory Studies and Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

Australia & Oceania: 

Ann Rogerson 

Ann Rogerson is an Associate Professor, and Associate Dean (Education) for the Faculty of Business and Law at University of Wollongong, Australia. She holds a Doctor of Business Administration (DBA), as well as masters degrees in management and higher education. Ann has taught postgraduate organisational behaviour, communication and leadership subjects in Australia and overseas, and currently teaches PhD students critical writing skills. Ann has a broad range of experience to demonstrate the importance of communication in the business world to enhance understanding and practical application of accommodating a range of intergroup memberships in workplaces. Her interest in interpersonal conversations and writing analysis has led to another body of work in the area of academic integrity and recognising patterns in student contract cheating. 

Europe: Karolina Hansen

Karolina Hansen is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Research on Prejudice at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and a research affiliate at Yale. She received her PhD in psychology from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Her research interests are in the fields of social psychology, sociolinguistics, and cross-cultural psychology. They include topics such as accent attitudes, stereotyping, gender-fair language, linguistic biases, and cross-cultural differences in social cognition. Currently, she studies accent attitudes in Poland, Germany, UK, and the US. She has published in diverse journals including Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience, Social Psychological and Personality Science, and Experimental Psychology. She is an associate editor of Psychology of Language and Communication and Journal of Social and Political Psychology

Europe: Anastassia Zabrodskaja 

Anastassia Zabrodskaja is Professor of Intercultural Communication and Head of the Communication Management Master’s programme at Tallinn University Baltic Film, Media and Arts School. She is an Executive Director of the European Masters in Intercultural Communication programme.  Professor Zabrodskaja is a Management Committee Member of the European Family Support Network Cost Action: A bottom-up, evidence-based and multidisciplinary approach (2019-2023). Her research deals with identity, intercultural communication, code-switching and linguistic landscape. She has published an Estonian-language monograph and numerous articles on bilingualism, translanguaging and language contacts. Profile in the Estonian Research Information System: https://www.etis.ee/CV/Anastassia_Zabrodskaja/eng

Latin America: Virginia Gründler

Virginia Gründler received her Master’s degree in Cognitive Psychology and Learning from the Autonomous University of Madrid. She is a teacher trainer, she teaches English as a foreign language to future teachers of different subjects at the National Administration of Public Education in different provinces in Uruguay. She is also an honorary Assistant at the Foreign Languages Center of the University of the Republic in Montevideo. Her main research interests are in the fields of psychology, education, foreign language learning and motivation. 


North America: Catherine Brooks

Catherine Brooks is an Associate Professor and the iSchool's Director at the University of Arizona, USA. Her primary research interest focuses on day-to-day language use in social contexts. She is most interested in the instructional or social uses of communication technologies, the varied opportunities for the co-construction of knowledge, relationships, and identities, as well as new possibilities for science communication and translation. Her research works across disciplinary boundaries and draws on a variety of academic traditions and methodologies. She teaches courses that focus on social media, information policy issues, and human encounters with new technologies. Alongside her scholarly work, she has published in outlets such as Scientific American and Wired

North America: Odilia Yim

Dr. Odilia Yim is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion Lab (directed by Dr. Sonia Kang) in the University of Toronto (UTM) Department of Management. She completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Ottawa, where she examined the social correlates of bilingualism, specifically how language switching relates to attitudes, cultural identity, and group solidarity. Her research focuses on the role of language in driving social psychological behaviours, such as social evaluations and language-based bias and discrimination. Odilia has centred her work among minority and marginalized populations, such as first- and second-generation immigrants from the Chinese community in Canada, with the goal to better understand the unique experiences of ethnic minorities and create identity-safe spaces within society.

[website link: www.odiliayim.com]

Student Representatives

Student Representative: Ivy Wu

Ivy Xiaoyan Wu is a PhD candidate with the Department of English and Communication at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her PhD thesis is positioned at the intersection of the social psychology of language and cross-cultural psychology and investigates the role of language and communication in Mainland Chinese students’ cross-cultural adaptation to Hong Kong. Ivy takes an intergroup approach to both second language acquisition and health communication. She focuses on both practitioner-patient and practitioner-practitioner communication, and has also researched into end-of-life communication between care workers and their service users.

Student Representative

(Vacant position)

Past Presidents

1997-2000 - Peter Robinson 

2000-2002 - Howie Giles 

2002-2004 - Cindy Gallois 

2004-2006 - Sik Hung Ng   

2006-2008 - Richard Clément  

2008-2010 - Jon Nussbaum

2010-2012 - Itesh Sachdev 

2012-2014 - Bernadette Watson

2014-2016 - Tony Young

2016-2018 - Maggie Pitts

2018-2022 - Liz Jones

2022-2024 - Jessica Gasiorek (current president)