Formerly the College Faculty Research Award, the Ellen A. Wartella Distinguished Research Award was renamed in 2012 in honor of former Moody College Dean Ellen Wartella.
Inaugurated in 1983, the Wartella Award honors one research article authored by a member of the Moody College faculty. Articles submitted for the competition and are considered according to their contributions in terms of: conceptual innovations; contribution to the literature in this field; and the methodological, pedagogical, or policy-related advances or contributions made.
A committee comprised of faculty from across the College selects the recipients.
Award Recipients
March 2023
Stephen Reese
Professor in the School of Journalism and Media
“Emerging Hybrid Networks of Verification, Accountability, and Institutional Resilience: The U.S Capitol Riot and The Work of Open-source.”
October 2022
Liberty Hamilton
Assistant Professor
Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences
Article: Parallel and distributed encoding of speech across human auditory cortex
February 2021
Dr. E. Ciszek
Assistant Professor
School of Advertising and Public Relations
Article: Power, Agency and Resistance in Public Relations: A Queer of Color Critique of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance
February 2020
Dr. Michael Butterworth
Professor
Department of Communication Studies
Article: George W. Bush as the 'Man in the Arena': Baseball, Public Memory, and the Rhetorical Redemption of aPresident
February 2019
Dr. Dhiraj Murthy
Associate Professor
School of Journalism
Article: Visualizing YouTube’s Comment Space: Online Hostility as a Networked Phenomena
February 2018
Dr. Mary Bock
Assistant Professor
School of Journalism
Article: Faith and Reason: An Analysis of the Homologies of Black & Blue Lives Facebook Pages
February 2017
Dr. H. Iris Chyi
Associate Professor
School of Journalism
Article: Reality Check: Multiplatform newspaper readership in the United States, 2007–2015
February 2016
Dr. Stephen D. Reese
ProfessorSchool of Journalism
Article: Globalization of mediated spaces: The case of transnational environmentalism in China
February 2015
Dr. Scott Stroud
Associate Professor
Department of Communication Studies
Article: The Dark Side of the Online Self: A Pragmatist Critique of the Growing Plague of Revenge Porn
February 2014
Dr. Jessica Franco
Clinical Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Article: Increasing Social InteractionUsing Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching with Nonverbal School-Age Children with Autism
February 2013
Dr. Erin Donovan-Kicken
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Studies
Article: The nature of communication work during cancer: Advancing the theory of illness trajectories
February 2012
Mr. Anthony Dudo
Assistant Professor
Department of Advertising
Article: Science on Television in the 21st Century: Recent Trends in Portrayals and their Contributions to Public Attitudes toward Science
May 2011
Dr. Jennifer Brundidge
Assistant Professor
Department of Radio-TV-Film
Article: Encountering ‘Difference’ in the Contemporary Public Sphere: The Contribution of the Internet to the Heterogeneity of Political Discussion Networks
May 2010
Dr. Iris Chyi
Assistant Professor
School of Journalism
Article: Is Online News an Inferior Good? Examining the Economic Nature of Online News among Users
May 2009
Dr. Ye Sun
Assistant Professor
Department of Advertising
Article: Understanding the Third-person Perception:Evidence from a Meta-analysis
May 2008
Dr. Swathi Kiran
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Article: Semantic Complexity in the Treatment of Naming Deficits
June 2007
Dr. Lisa Bedore
Associate Professor
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Article: [with Christine Fiestas, Elizabeth Peña, and Vanessa Nagy]Cross-language Comparisons of Maze use in Spanish and English in Functionally Monolingual and Bilingual Children
July 2006
Dr. Craig A. Champlin
Associate Professor
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Article:[with Jeffrey Marler]Sensory Perception of Backward-Masking Signals in Children with Language-Learning Impairment asAssessed with the Auditory Brainstem Response