COLLEGE
OF COMMUNICATION
SESQUICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION WEEK
SCHEDULE OF ACTIVITIES
October 8 - October
14, 2001
Vicki
S. Freimuth, Ph.D.
Center for Disease
Control and Prevention - CDC
Sesquicentennial Speech: Communicating Health in the Millennium: Perspectives
from the CDC
Vicki S. Freimuth, Ph.D., is the Associate Director for Communication
at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta,
Georgia. Dr. Freimuth has molded
the Office of Communication since its inception in 1996, expanding communication’s
role and effectiveness among CDC’s programs and partners. She has firmly established communication as
a core part of the agency’s infrastructure and intervention formula.
Under Dr. Freimuth’s stewardship CDC has achieved a network
of communication staff throughout the agency, a broad communication
training curriculum, market research databases resources to target messages,
a communication research agenda and internal research grant program,
development of professional and partnership networks and, creative and
evaluation contracts.
Dr. Freimuth’s expertise in the field of communication spans
25 years and has resulted in significant contributions to the study
and practice of disease prevention and health promotion. She is an internationally recognized leader in health communication.
Formerly she was the Director of Health Communication and Professor
in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland, College
Park. She taught courses there
in health communication, diffusion of innovations, and research methods.
Her research focused on the role of communication in health promotion
in the United States and in developing countries.
In addition to contributing to research in health communication,
she has made exceptional advances in this field. She developed the first graduate program with
a health communication focus in this country, an approach that many
universities have since emulated. In
1998 she received the prestigious Outstanding Health Communication Scholar
Award from the National and International Communication Associations.
Dr. Freimuth
is the author of Searching for Health Information and co-editor
of AIDS: A Communication Perspective.
Her publications have appeared in Health Communication Research,
Journal of Communication, American Journal of Public Health,
Health Education Quarterly, and Science Technology and Human
Values. She has been Chair of the Health Communication
Division of the International Communication Association and has provided
strategic vision on health communication to many private and federal
health organizations. She has
also been the director of research at Porter Novelli and Associates,
a public affairs firm in Washington, D.C. and serves on a number of
advisory boards. She has a B.S. with Honors in Education from
Eastern Illinois University, a M.A. in Rhetoric and Public Address from
the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in Communication Theory and Research
from Florida State University.
