Meet Our Team

Leshner is the Edward L. and Thelma Gaylord endowed chair in journalism in the Gaylord College of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. He also directs the OU PRIME Lab, located in the Center for Applied Social Research on OU’s research campus. His research is in the area of communication regulatory science (CRS), psychological processing of mediated information, including attention, memory, affect, and behavior, particularly with respect to health messages. He has conducted research on how individuals process health-related information, such as anti-tobacco audio/visual messages. He currently is a co-I on an FDA/NIH R01 grant in which he explores viewers’ responses to anti-hookah messages. He has produced more than 150 articles, book chapters, and conference papers, and has published in top-tier journals such as Communication Research, Media Psychology, Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, and Health Communication. Leshner has won research paper awards from both AEJMC and ICA, and directed a dissertation of the year presented jointly by ICA and NCA. He came to the Gaylord College after serving more than 20 years on the faculty of the Missouri School of Journalism where he co-directed its PRIME Lab. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, his M.M.C. from the University of South Carolina, and his B.A. from Rutgers University.

Jinhee Seo is a PhD candidate in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. She is interested in the motivation and characteristics of using social media and cognition and emotional advertising effects pertaining to social media. She is also interested in examining the interaction and relationship between influencers and users on social media regarding advertising effects.

Xiao Liu is a doctoral student at Gaylord College at the University of Oklahoma. She comes from a city in the south of China, a city as warm as Norman. Her research interest is news framing of social-justice-related issues and its effects on audiences’ knowledge of the issues from the theoretical perspective of information processing. She worked as a reporting intern at a Chinese traffic radio and an online publication Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, an editing intern at a Chinese new media company, and a storytelling intern at a documentary film crew in China.

Kyra Newcombe is a doctoral student at Gaylord College at The University of Oklahoma. Kyra is passionate about health communication. Her research is mainly focused on electronic cigarette use among college women, though she also investigates how portrayals of women in media influence their health behaviors. 

Narae Kim is an assistant professor of advertising at the Donald W. Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. Kim’s research focuses on the area of health communication, with an emphasis on underrepresented populations. Specifically, she has been working on developing effective health communication programs to improve Indigenous populations’ health status through collaborative work with Native American tribes. Her recent work has also centered around the psychophysiological processing of mediated health messages and the role of public communication in coping with health problems and public health crises. 

Haijing Ma is an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston-Victoria. She studies health communication and social influence. She is interested in the emotional and cognitive processing of messages dealing with health-relevant issues and risks (e.g., vaping, tornado, climate change, terrorism, etc.). She is also interested in social and environmental factors impacting health behavior (e.g., policy, social media).

Brian Ruedinger is a research data analyst at the Surgical Outcomes & Quality Improvement Center (SOQIC) at Indiana University School of Medicine. He has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Oklahoma, where he graduated in 2022. His role is to support faculty and fellows in their research projects by advising them on the best statistical techniques for their data analysis. He also assists them in writing and presenting their findings in clear and accurate ways.

Kevin Hahn is a master's student studying Creative Media Production at the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. His primary research interest is advertising effectiveness of new media such as Virtual Reality. 

Seunghyun Kim earned his Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication and served as the first OU PRIME Lab manager. His dissertation examined the effects of native advertising on online news media users’ cognitive and behavioral processing. His research has mainly focused on the effects of digital advertising on user experience, and health communication. He currently holds a marketing position in the Department of Management, Marketing, and Technology, School of Business, University of Little Rock-Arkansas.

Fuwei Sun earned his Ph.D. at the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. His research direction explores customers through psychological perspectives and consumer experiences. Additionally, he is interested in health communication, political communication, and public relations research. He currently holds an assistant professor position at Fu Hsing Kang College, National Defense University in Taiwan.

Rashmi Thapaliya graduated with a Ph.D. in Strategic Communication from the University of Oklahoma. She is an assistant professor of Public Relations at Eastern Illinois University. Her areas of study are public relations, strategic communication, and health communication.

Dr. Wagener is the director of the Center for Tobacco Research and co-leader of the Cancer Control Program at the OSUCCC – James, as well as a professor and endowed chair in the Department of Internal Medicine at The Ohio State University. He received his doctoral training in clinical psychology with a specialization in health psychology/behavioral medicine from Oklahoma State University and completed his psychology residency and T32 postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular behavioral medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the Centers of Behavioral and Preventive Medicine. He is a licensed psychologist and directed the behavioral sleep medicine clinic at OU Children’s Hospital from 2011 to 2016. Dr. Wagener's research has a specialized focus on evaluating the behavioral, pharmacological, and toxicological effects of cigarette and non-cigarette tobacco products, such as electronic cigarettes and hookah. He also has expertise in developing and testing motivational, enhancement-based smoking cessation and secondhand smoke reduction interventions for children of parents who smoke.

Dr. Elise Stevens is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in the Division of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine and the Director of the UMass Chan Center for Tobacco Treatment Research and Training. As a health communication scientist, she focuses on research about the cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to health messages using psychophysiology, self-report, behavioral experiments, and randomized trials.