Lisa M Paulin
As an associate professor, Dr. Paulin carries many responsibilities within the department, along with teaching Mass Media and Society and Mass Communication Theory and Research in the undergraduate program. Her responsibilities include serving as the assessment coordinator, chair of the curriculum committee, and chair of strategic planning and accreditation. Her research focuses on underrepresented and misrepresented groups in the media, mainly focusing on Latinx in Spanish-language and English news media in the U.S. through a cultural citizenship lens.
Since 2020, she has been a member of five National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded grant projects, focusing on COVID-19 and health disparities. As a member of the Advanced Center for COVID-19 Related Disparities (ACCORD) team, Dr. Paulin participated in survey design, administered surveys at testing events, served as a Spanish interpreter during testing events, conducted qualitative research on the impact of COVID-19 on Black churches, input and analyzed survey data, co-led the design, writing and editing of a newsletter to help underserved communities understand the development of the COVID-19 vaccines and other pandemic-related issues, and organized online community town halls to learn from community health liaisons in rural counties in English and Spanish.
She is one of the authors of "COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Underserved Communities of North Carolina" (PLOS ONE), has given an international conference presentation, has participated as a pre-conference panelist at an international conference and a national conference, and was an invited-speaker for two campus events based on work with ACCORD (most co-authored with T. Zhang).
Dr. Paulin was an investigator on the RQ2 of the NIH’s NC Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) team (2021–2022), where she collaborated on the Institutional Review Board (IRB) application, interview questions, recruitment of interview participants and transcript analysis for a project focused on what Black and Latinx NC residents understand about clinical testing and treatments for COVID-19. Based on the findings, she co-authored and coordinated a video explaining clinical testing focusing on safety measures that were implemented in light of the Tuskegee Experiment.
She is still working on a series of testimonial videos about college students’ experiences with clinical testing and their COVID-19 experiences (forthcoming). She is also coordinating the development of five English and Spanish animation videos that will be published as comic books. The animations are focused on a Latinx audience and deal with COVID-19 treatment and long COVID. She is a co-author on a methods and ethics case study about recruiting online focus groups (in progress). She has served as the NC representative on the CEAL Communications Working Group since 2021.
Dr. Paulin is a co-PI for NC CEAL 2.0, focusing on conducting an analysis of national media coverage of COVID-19 vaccination and curating resources to create a user-friendly site for medical personnel, health workers, community outreach, educators and media with COVID-19 resources by topic, by medium and by intended audience.
She is also an investigator for the Office of Minority Health (OMH) Bull City Strong grant project aimed at reducing health disparities in Durham, North Carolina, where she serves on the communication and evaluation team.
Dr. Paulin is a faculty member of the newly launched Communications Health Core at NCCU, an interdisciplinary initiative between mass communication, public health communication, psychology, and library and information science.