Kathleen Hall Jamieson Named to CDC Advisory Group on Communications

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named to a working group on communications for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD).

Jamieson has been named to the 15-member Communications and Public Engagement Workgroup (CPEW), which assists the ACD “on agency-wide activities related to how to communicate directly and more effectively with the public, with a focus on reaching local communities with messages.”

The CPEW includes experts in communications, public health science and practice, community engagement, and behavioral science/behavioral change who will work with the ACD on recommendations for effective communication with the public. This includes areas such as building relationships to communicate via trusted messengers (like clinicians, faith and community leaders); improving risk communication practices; tailoring messages to different audiences, and improving the transparency of communications.

Jamieson is a co-founder of FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and its science-focused initiative, SciCheck. In 2020, Jamieson was awarded the National Academy of Sciences’ Public Welfare Medal, its highest honor, for her “non-partisan crusade to ensure the integrity of facts in public discourse and development of the science of scientific communication to promote public understanding of complex issues.”

Jamieson’s research has examined, among other things, the factors that affect public perceptions of scientists’ credibility and confidence in science. She co-authored an opinion article in the Journal of the American Medical Association calling for renaming the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to reduce the likelihood that its unconfirmed reports would be misinterpreted or misrepresented by the public, as they were at times during the pandemic.

Jamieson is the author or co-author of 18 books and she co-edited “The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication” (2017). She also is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association; and a member or fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Communication Association.