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RESEARCH
While in graduate school, I helped initiate a multidisciplinary design project involving students from industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, and technical communication. Working together, students on these multidisciplinary teams planned and created a design project for an outside client. This experience played a pivotal role in helping me define research interests in the following areas: writing in engineering, knowledge transfer, collaborative processes, and workplace communication.
Writing in Engineering and Knowledge Transfer
For my dissertation, I conducted a study to determine what rhetorical strategies engineering students rely on when completing communication assignments in a senior-level engineering course. A description and discussion of the results of this study were published in the December 2004 issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. I am currently conducting a follow-up study, focusing on the rhetorical strategies electrical engineering students rely on as they plan, design, and present senior design projects. This study is supported through a grant from the Center for Teaching Excellence at Eastern New Mexico University.
Technical Communication Practices in the Workplace
My other research projects investigate the role of professional communicators in various workplace settings. In “The Big Chill: A Conversation with Seven Professionals Ten Years After They Graduated with Master’s Degrees in Technical Communication.” Greg Wilson and I recount the experiences of seven professional entering the field and discuss the ways their perceptions of the profession and roles within it have changed. In "From Medical Writer to Communication Specialist: Expanding Roles and Contributions in Pharmaceutical Organizations" Stephen Bernhardt, Gregory Cuppan, and I examine the expanding roles played by medical writers in pharmaceutical workplaces. We describe the ways in which the responsibilities and contributions of medical writers in pharmaceutical organizations are changing, and explore the value medical writers bring to both processes and products in pharmaceutical environments.
For the last couple of years I have collaborated with Dr. Lorelei Ortiz from St. Edward's University in Austin researching the role organizational communication plays within a major U.S. airline. Since the airline industry has undergone dramatic changes post 9-11, the ways in which those changes are both communicated and then impact workplace practices has provided very interesting material for analysis. The particular airline we are studying has also undergone a merger as well as a bid from the Teamster's Union, situations that have both yielded fertile ground for our study.