Welcome to my website. I am an Associate Professor of communication at Santa Clara University, where my teaching and research focus on the ways in which organizational members communicate about social support, work/life balance, and stress. My scholarship allows me to focus on how both organizations and individual members work to communicate support as a stress-reduction technique.
One of the primary goals of my research is to find realistic ways to use communication networks to help organizations and their members seek productivity through a more connective, supportive, and healthy workplace. In doing so, I have studied stress both psychologically and physiologically and designed and tested interventions. My colleagues and I have identified a new variable in the literature – Communicatively Restricted Organizational Stress (CROS), which is a meta-stressor associated with the perceived inability to communicate about stressful situations and issues with organizational colleagues. I have also studied a phenomenon called co-rumination, which is when two people engage in problem-talk that is focused only on the problem and not the solution. Co-rumination can be quite damaging to health, even though it feels good to do at the time.
At Santa Clara University I teach courses in organizational communication, quantitative research methods, biology and communication, training & development, conflict & negotiation, and senior thesis.
I am also the 1st Vice President of the Western States Communication Association and will be planning the academic convention in Albuquerque, NM in February of 2025.
I hope that you find the information on this site to be informative and I encourage you to contact me with any questions. Thanks for visiting!