My research spans several interconnected areas, all of which share a common premise: that how people learn to communicate is a more complex and interesting question than most curricula acknowledge, and that getting it right — in the classroom, in the institution, and increasingly in the age of AI — requires taking that complexity seriously.

Applying Recent Advances in Neuroscience to Communication Pedagogy

The theoretical foundation of my research is my doctoral dissertation, A Phenomenology of Mimetic Learning and Multimodal Cognition (Michigan Technological University, 2014), which argues that Western education has long privileged conceptual, abstract knowledge at the expense of the experiential knowledge people develop through situated, body-engaged practice. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, recent neuroscientific accounts of situated and embodied cognition — particularly Vittorio Gallese’s work on mirror neurons and sensorimotor attunement — and the largely forgotten mimetic pedagogy of the ancient Greek Sophists, I develop a framework I call mimetic multimodality. The central claim is that communication is never merely transmission: it is a feedback loop in which meaning is enacted rather than delivered, and in which the most capable communicators are those most attuned — perceptually, sensorially, situationally — to the contexts they’re operating in. That premise is the thread connecting everything else in my research. A fuller account of the argument lives on this page; an extended version is available in my blog.

Experiential Learning and Simulation Design

If situated learning theory is right that cognition is shaped by the contexts in which it occurs, then the design question becomes: how do you create genuinely immersive, situationally rich learning environments inside a classroom? That question drives my ongoing work on business communication simulations. Working within the experiential learning tradition and drawing on research linking students’ perception of a simulation’s authenticity to deeper engagement and competency development, I have been designing and iterating on simulations that treat the classroom as an extension of the fictional workplace — complete with sequenced assignments, role-defined relationships, and the kinds of contextual constraints that make a learning situation feel real rather than academic. The guiding research question is whether students’ perception of a simulation’s authenticity predicts the depth of their engagement and the transferability of the skills they develop. My current evidence — and the broader literature — suggests it does.

Multimodal Literacy and Rhetorical Awareness

A related line of inquiry examines how students develop awareness of communication as a craft — specifically, how they learn to read and write with attention to the rhetorical choices that shape how meaning is made and received. My 2020 chapter in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, “Punctuation’s Rhetorical Effects”, is an accessible expression of this work: it argues that students develop a feel for punctuation not by studying usage rules in the abstract but by learning to see and hear how punctuation operates on actual pages — what I call visual and aural reading strategies. This work connects to a broader interest in knowledge transfer: the conditions under which students carry what they learn in one rhetorical context forward into genuinely different ones, and why those conditions are harder to create than most assignment design assumes.

Human-AI Interaction and Business Communication Pedagogy

The most recent thread in my research addresses a question that can’t be avoided: what does AI mean for the teaching of communication? My current work argues that the most productive framework for students is neither uncritical adoption nor reflexive avoidance, but what I’m calling iterative collaboration — treating AI as a brilliant but contextually limited interlocutor that requires clear direction, critical oversight, and genuine editorial judgment to be useful. I’ve developed a practical pedagogical framework around three orientations: critical use (evaluating and refining AI outputs), strategic use (designing effective prompts as a form of professional communication), and responsible use (transparent, ethical, and environmentally mindful engagement with AI tools). I’m also interested in the emergence of human-AI interaction (HAI) as a distinct communication register alongside interpersonal and intrapersonal communication — one that business communication curricula have only begun to reckon with.

Faculty Equity and Institutional Governance

Since 2023 I have served on two University of Arizona committees focused on career-track faculty conditions, in roles that have been substantively research-intensive. The General Faculty Committee on Career-Track Faculty Needs designed and administered a university-wide survey of over 800 faculty, analyzed the quantitative and qualitative data, and produced a formal report with policy recommendations for the Faculty Senate. The Career Track Promotions Pathways Ad hoc Committee conducted a comparative analysis of career-track title and promotion structures at peer AACSB institutions. I have also written policy documents making the case for career-track faculty representation on the Faculty Senate committees dealing with academic freedom — arguments grounded in close analysis of Faculty Bylaws, ABOR policy, UHAP, and Faculty Senate governance documents. This work sits at the intersection of institutional policy research and faculty advocacy, and reflects a conviction that shared governance functions best when the structures of representation match the realities of who is actually doing the work of the university.