Lessons from a Pandemic: Health Messaging, Culture, and Pandemic Response

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Recording:

Agenda:

8:00 am – 8:15 am – Check in

8:15 am – 8:30 am –  Welcome & Introductions

• Steve Palmer (ABRC Co-lead), PhD – NAU Department of Health Sciences
• Dawn Gilpin (workshop host), PhD – ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Matt Maurer (workshop host), MPH – NAU Department of Health Sciences

8:30 am – 8:50 am – A Pandemic in the Genomic Age

• David Engelthaler, PhD – TGen North

8:50 am – 9:10 am – Public health response to the pandemic

• Matt Maurer, MPH – NAU Department of Health Sciences

9:10 am – 9:30 am – Moving to an endemic

• Brettania O’Connor, PhD – NAU Department of Health Sciences

9:30 am – 10:00 am – Q&A with panel

10:00 am – 10:15 am – Break

10:15 am – 11:15 am – Discussion panel: Trust and health messaging in the media

• Dawn Gilpin, PhD (moderator) – ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Nikki McClaran, PhD – ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Pauline Arrillaga – ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Alexis Koskan, PhD – ASU College of Health Solutions
• Jonathan Nez – former President and Vice President of the Navajo Nation
• Lisa Hardy, PhD – NAU Department of Anthropology

11:15 am – 12:15 pm – Discussion panel: Pandemics and disinformation

• Dawn Gilpin, PhD (moderator) – ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Kristy Roschke, PhD – ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Lance Gharavi, PhD – ASU School of Music, Dance and Theatre
• Shawn Walker, PhD – ASU School of Social and Behavioral Sciences

12:15 pm – 1:15 pm – Lunch

1:15 pm – 2:15 pm – Discussion panel: Pandemic management, policy, and response

• Dawn Gilpin, PhD (moderator) – ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Dr. Amish Shah, MD, MPH – Arizona House of Representatives
• Matt Maurer, MPH – NAU Department of Health Sciences
• Jonathan Nez – former President and Vice President of the Navajo Nation

2:15 pm – 4:00 pm – Roundtable discussions: Into the future…

4:00 pm – 4:45 pm – Sharing of recommendations

4:45 pm – 5:00 pm – Wrap up workshop

Speakers:

Workshop Hosts:

Matt Maurer, MPH – NAU Department of Health Sciences

Matt earned his Bachelor of Science in Microbiology at Northern Arizona University, with minors in Chemistry and Political Science. He earned his Master’s in Public Health (MPH) from Des Moines University, with an emphasis in Epidemiology. Matt worked in Environmental Health for 8 years at Coconino County Health and Human Services. After receiving his master’s degree, he became the Senior Epidemiologist for Coconino County, which he has been doing for the previous 6 years. Matt is currently a Lecturer in Public Health at Northern Arizona University for the Department of Health Sciences.

During his time in public health, he collaborated with the various Tribal communities throughout Northern Arizona, delivering a commitment to the health of Indigenous peoples. He believes strongly in community engagement and worked to educate and increase access to public health. With the many challenges facing us today, Matt is passionate about helping to create a sustainable future and use the knowledge he has gained from his career in public health to empower students for academic excellence and student success.

Dawn Gilpin, PhD – ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Dawn Gilpin is an associate professor with the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at ASU. She spent more than 15 years working in Italy in various areas of organizational communication and public relations, including crisis management and internal communication. She joined the Cronkite School faculty after completing her doctorate in mass Media and communication at Temple University, where she was a Presidential Fellow.

Gilpin’s research interests focus on the interactions between organizations, media and public policy, particularly in terms of organizational and issue identity, and the dynamics of knowledge and power. She explores these questions using mixed methodologies including narrative and network analysis in addition to other quantitative and qualitative methods. Her work has been published by Oxford University Press, Communication Theory, Journal of Public Relations Research, Public Relations Review, among others, and included in several peer-reviewed collections.

She teaches primarily in the areas of public relations, communication theory and research methods. During her professional career, she also developed and taught numerous workshops on topics such as trade show communication, crisis communication and management, group dynamics and teamwork, and others. She is a member of the International Communication Association, Association of Internet Researchers, and Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Workshop Speakers:

Dave Engelthaler, PhD – TGen North

Dr. Dave Engelthaler is a Professor and the Director of TGen North, the infectious disease arm of the non-profit Translational Genomics Research Institute. He is also the Scientific Director of the TGen North Clinical Laboratory, which was stood up in March 2020 to specifically provide COVID-19 testing and has provided tests for tens of thousands of underserved Arizonans, especially in Tribal and rural communities; and his team coordinated the statewide SARS-CoV-2 sequencing of the first year of the pandemic. Dave oversees a number of research groups working on detecting and understanding infectious diseases such as Covid, tuberculosis and valley fever. His team at TGen also provides genomic services to CDC, state, local and tribal health departments and Arizona healthcare institutions. Dave was previously the Arizona State Epidemiologist and a biologist for the CDC, and is a double alumnus of Northern Arizona University (‘91 and ‘14). He has published over 150 scientific papers and chapters on epidemiology, disease ecology, genetics, and microbiology and he has over two dozen patented inventions. He has started for-profit and non-profit businesses, sits on a number of local and national Boards and proudly led the establishment of Flagstaff, AZ as “America’s First STEM City”.

Brettania O’Connor, PhD, MPH – NAU Department of Health Sciences

Dr. Brettania O’Connor earned a PhD in Epidemiology from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health specializing in infectious disease epidemiology. She earned both a Master of Public Health degree with a concentration in Environmental and Occupational Health and a Graduate Certificate in International Health Policy from The George Washington University. She is currently the MPH Program Director at Northern Arizona University.

Brettania’s research focuses on rural health, health disparities and barriers to accessing health care, including accessing and remaining in HIV clinical care. She has worked at the National Cancer Institute, World Wide Fund for Nature’s Global Arctic Programme office in Norway and throughout Europe, in rural Brazil focusing on maternal and child health and at Northern Arizona University.

Nikki McClaran, PhD – ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Nikki McClaran (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an assistant professor of strategic communication at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Her research explores the cognitive, social and motivational determinants of health behaviors and how mass media messages can be constructed to facilitate successful persuasion and engagement. She is particularly interested in the use of popular media and social norm appeals. Her work has been published journals such as Health Communication, Human Communication Research, and Journal of Environmental Management. Dr. McClaran currently serves as the student and early career representative for the International Communication Association (ICA) Health Communication Division.

Pauline Arrillaga – ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Pauline Arrillaga is a nationally renowned journalist who serves as executive editor of the Carnegie-Knight News21 program, which brings top journalism students from across the country to ASU’s Cronkite School to produce in-depth projects. Arrillaga joined the Cronkite School in 2019 to launch the Southwest Health Reporting Initiative, a program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that teaches the journalists of tomorrow to report on health disparities in underserved communities and communities of color. Throughout the pandemic, Arrillaga’s students produced dozens of stories about the effect of COVID on often-overlooked individuals. Their work was showcased in professional media outlets nationwide and captured numerous awards. Prior to joining Cronkite, Arrillaga spent 27 years at The Associated Press. As the AP’s U.S. Enterprise Editor, she helped shape coverage examining the effects of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies on children and families. That series was named a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting and was a winner of an RFK Journalism Award and the John Seigenthaler Prize for Courage in Reporting. She also oversaw an AP project on missing and murdered Native American women, winner of the Dori J. Maynard Award for Justice in Journalism, the Les Payne Award for Coverage on Communities of Color, and other honors.

Alexis Koskan, PhD – ASU College of Health Solutions

Dr. Alexis Koskan is a Population Health Assistant Professor at ASU’s College of Health Solutions. She is trained in conducting community-engaged public health research, and her work focuses on preventing and controlling infectious diseases through vaccination and disease screening. Her initial lines of research focused on preventing cancers caused by human papillomavirus, HPV for short. Her descriptive and intervention studies aimed to increase HPV vaccination and screening for HPV-related cancers among vulnerable populations. More recently she has extended lessons learned from her HPV vaccination work to learn how best to address COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

While working at the College of Health Solutions, Dr. Koskan completed the National Cancer Institute’s Training in Dissemination and Implementation Research in Cancer (TIDIRC) program. Her goal is to make evidence-based interventions more accessible to various populations in different community and clinical settings, thereby helping to prevent and control conditions caused by infectious diseases.

Jonathan Nez, BS, MPA – Former President and Vice President of the Navajo Nation

Jonathan Nez is the former President and a former Vice President of the Navajo Nation. As President from 2019-2023, he credited the resilience and strength of the Navajo people for the Navajo Nation’s success in mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic began, the Navajo Nation had a per capita infection rate higher than New York City. Despite what the data showed, Nez and his administration refused to allow the Navajo people to succumb to the disease. With the guidance of public health experts, the Navajo Nation implemented public health orders and vaccine protocols that ultimately led to the Navajo people having the highest vaccination rates in the country.

As Nez prepared for this presentation, he reflected back on the pandemic as a defining moment in Navajo history, one that symbolizes the unbreakable resilience and indomitable spirit of his people. With each memory discussed, he will be reminded of his Nation’s unwavering determination and resilience to overcome adversity. The Navajo Nation led the way and provided a model for responding to a pandemic for other tribal nations across the country. Dr. Anthony Fauci once publicly stated that if the United States had followed the mitigation strategy that the Navajo Nation implemented, the country would have been out of the pandemic far sooner. President Nez holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science and a Masters of Public Administration, both from Northern Arizona University.

Lisa Hardy, PhD, MA – NAU School of Anthropology

Lisa Hardy, PhD, MA, serves as professor of anthropology at NAU, research lead on several community partnership projects, Director of the Social Science Community Engagement Lab, and editor of the journal Practicing Anthropology.

She is also faculty for NAU’s PhD in interdisciplinary health. She serves on the Research Infrastructure Core of the NIH MIHD funded The Southwest Heath Equity Research Collaborative providing technical assistance and guidance to health-focused researchers. Dr. Hardy’s research foci include social justice through medical anthropology; policy and systems change; health equity; cities; community-engaged research; project evaluation; ethnographic methods; N America.

Dr. Hardy is currently leading rapid response research on the coronavirus pandemic and has published on space and place, cultural and political perceptions of contagion, and racism related to virus control. Her team is working on US-based qualitative data collection and analysis and have partnered with a group of international researchers exploring comparative data through a large-scale survey. Results are designed to improve support for people living through the pandemic and future disaster response.

Kristy Roschke, PhD – ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Kristy Roschke is an expert in media literacy. Her work focuses on helping people find new ways of
understanding and interacting with news information. Roschke is the managing director of the News Co/Lab at
the Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The Lab works
to advance media literacy through journalism, education and technology. Roschke has taught journalism,
digital media production and media literacy courses at the high school and university level for 20 years.

Lance Gharavi, PhD – ASU School of Music, Dance and Theatre

Lance Gharavi is Professor in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre at Arizona State University and Associate Director of ASU’s Interplanetary Initiative. His work focuses on points of intersection between performance, technology, science, and religion. He specializes in leading transdisciplinary teams of artists, scientists, designers, and engineers to create compelling experiences and advance research. Current projects include: Port of Mars, an NSF-funded game-based platform for social science experiments to help future human space communities thrive; Sacred Space, a series of public symposia about religion and space exploration; a project sponsored by the Center for Narrative, Disinformation, and Strategic Influence laying the theoretical foundation of the phenomena known as the “Big Lie”; and GHOST Lab, a DoD-funded laboratory/art installation for research into robotics and AI. He is the director of St. Bird, an art/science collective, the leader of Ars Robotica, an initiative to advance research in robotics and AI through the arts, and the Executive Director of the Centre for Applied Eschatology, an ongoing conceptual art project about endings and our relations to them.

Shawn Walker, PhD – ASU School of Social and Behavioral Sciences

Shawn is an Assistant Professor of Social Data Science in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. His research focuses on online mis/disinformation and online resistance circulating in social media during social movements, protests, and elections as well as the related challenges of collecting, analyzing, and preserving data from social media platforms. He also works in the area of computation social science, pairing machine learning techniques with qualitative methods to scale work to large datasets. He received his doctorate in Information Science from the University of Washington Information School. He is also a senior research fellow with the New America Foundation where his work has focused on role of alt-right platforms such as Paler in the January 6th insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. His current work with New America focus on the Ukraine and the tracking activities of the Wagner Group in the Ukraine conflict and beyond.

Dr. Amish Shah, MD, MPH – Arizona House of Representatives

Amish Shah, MD, MPH was born and raised in Chicago, Ill. His mother and father were engineering students who immigrated from India in the 1960s. His father is Jain and his mother is Hindu. He attended Catholic school from grades K-12. He attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics. He graduated from Northwestern University Medical School as part of the Honors Program in Medical Education.

After medical school, Dr. Shah worked for LEK Consulting, LLC, an international strategy consulting firm. He completed a Master’s in Public Health with a full Merit Scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, followed by residency training in Emergency Medicine at New York City’s busiest Level I trauma center. He won the American Academy of Emergency Medicine’s National Resident Research Competition for his work in inventing a new method to provide care for the critically ill.

Dr. Shah taught medical students and residents at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York as a full-time faculty member and academic researcher. He has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals. While there, he also led the New York Jets Airway Management Team. Amidst concern over the potential catastrophic injuries, he helped the NFL improve their emergency management through research and presented his work at the NFL Physicians’ Society.

Dr. Shah graduated from the University of Arizona’s Sports Medicine fellowship, a Division I college program featuring a wide breadth of sports coverage. His research project and clinical focus were ultrasound-guided procedures and diagnostics. He is currently board certified in Emergency Medicine and Sports Medicine and practices throughout Arizona, treating adults and children. Outside of his medical practice, he founded the first Arizona Vegetarian Food Festival as a philanthropic endeavor to promote healthy eating and eliminate preventable disease. He contributes to Sounds Academy and the Humane Society of the United States, organizations that focus on children’s exposure to the arts and the promotion of a kind society, as well as several other charities.

Since 2019, he has been a member of the Arizona House of Representatives, serving Central Phoenix and South Scottsdale. He has been the recipient of several awards for the quality of his service, including the Arizona Capitol Times’ Best Political Rising Star for two consecutive years, the Arizona Medical Association’s Distinguished Community Service Award, and the Humane Society’s Legislator of the Year. He is the recipient of the 2022 Legislator of the Year / Womens’ Health Champion Award from the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Amish enjoys basketball, flying small airplanes, and adventurous travel. He speaks conversational Spanish and fluent Gujarati. He has three adopted cats named Hillary, Miss Meowerson, and Cousin Oliver.

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