Creating Connections and Expanding Communication Research

When Emily Falk describes her work, the word "we" comes up often. As Vice Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, she is a professor, lab director, division director, mentor, researcher, and community builder. On any given day, she might move from a faculty strategy session to a student research presentation, then to a meeting about climate partnerships across the university. For Falk, research is not meant to only sit quietly within academic journals or conference halls. It is meant to travel: between communities, institutions, policy debates, and everyday life.

“My goal is to champion and support Penn scholars and our partners in creating new knowledge, public value, and bridging that knowledge to action. That’s ultimately how we create a better future,” she says. 

She shares this vision with Sarah Banet-Weiser, the Walter H. Annenberg Dean, who appointed Falk as the School's inaugural vice dean early in her tenure. A priority of Banet-Weiser’s leadership is fostering collaboration across the School, Penn, and beyond. Falk, she notes, already embodies that spirit through her research, mentorship, and community-engaged work. Now, the pair work together to cultivate a community unified by a shared commitment to innovative, impactful research. 

"The Annenberg School has always been a leader in understanding how communication influences the world around us. Today, the stakes are higher than ever," Banet-Weiser says. "The challenges our society faces, such as the spread of misinformation and the threat of climate change, are fundamentally related to communication. As a cross-disciplinary community of scholars, we are uniquely positioned to tackle these issues. Emily, in her role as vice dean, is helping us do just that."

A Vision Built Together

Falk, Professor of Communication, Psychology, Marketing, Operations, Information, and Decisions, arrived at Annenberg in 2013 and has spent over a decade getting to know the Annenberg community and building partnerships beyond: teaching in classrooms, serving on dissertation committees, mentoring undergraduates, and building up a diverse research agenda with a wide range of collaborators and community partners.

She has made countless connections across Penn, the city of Philadelphia, and beyond, collaborating with colleagues across disciplines in Wharton, Penn Medicine, Penn Engineering, Penn Arts & Sciences, the Weitzman School of Design, Penn's Netter Center for Community Partnerships, among others. In 2018, her popular undergraduate course, “The Communication Research Experience,” helped relaunch “Penn Leads the Vote,” a non-partisan, student-led effort to advance voter registration, civic education, and voting across the Penn community. Falk has made community-engaged scholarship one cornerstone of her work, serving as the inaugural Provost’s Faculty Fellow at the Netter Center and encouraging her fellow faculty to incorporate community partnerships into their research agendas. She co-teaches a Netter Center-affiliated course that pairs Penn doctoral students with youth in West Philadelphia to identify, research, and address pressing social, environmental, and health issues in the community.

Before stepping into the vice dean role in the fall of 2023, Falk served as associate dean of research, where she led a committee charged with finding new ways to support research at Annenberg and share these insights with the broader public. That planted the seeds for the work she is excited to share — the creation of four School-wide research networks:

• Health Communication
• Politics, Policy, and Institutions 
• Cultural Inquiry
• Computational Social Science

Together, they are a key component of the Annenberg School's new strategic vision, providing structure and community for researchers whose work might otherwise unfold in isolation. The networks encourage scholars to identify shared questions and complementary tools, acting as a connective tissue across disciplines and methodologies.

Under Falk’s leadership, the School is refining how it supports grant development, interdisciplinary teams, and public-facing scholarship. Last year, in the wake of sweeping cuts to federal funding for academic research, Falk launched a pilot grant program open to Annenberg faculty, students, and research staff to fund projects within and across these research networks that connect with local communities and demonstrate the value of Penn’s research to those outside academia. She is also partnering with the communication and development offices to amplify the effects of these efforts.

One funded project, led by Professor Desmond Upton Patton and SAFELab Co-Director Siva Mathiyazhagan, is JoyNet: an AI-driven digital platform for Black youth grappling with grief to process their feelings, find joy, and build community. Grounded in Patton’s research on the impact of social media on well-being, mental health, trauma, violence, and grief on youth and adults of color, JoyNet is being developed in partnership with young people from Philadelphia and New York City, who are providing insight on everything from visuals to algorithm training.

“We’re working with young people to consider how AI could intentionally optimize for joy, especially in a world where trauma, grief, and pain are part of everyday life,” says Patton, Waldo E. Johnson, Jr. Professor of Communication. “I’m so glad that Annenberg sees the value and promise in our work and is helping us move JoyNet to the next level.”

Research That Improves Lives

Falk remains an active researcher. As the director of Penn’s Communication Neuroscience Lab, she and her team study how people coordinate, bond, and influence one another.  Climate communication has become a prominent focus of the team’s research, complementing Falk’s work as director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Climate Communication Division, a hub for research on climate communication, resilience, action, and policy. 

A recent study by Falk's team, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigated which communication strategies are most effective at motivating people to take action on climate change. The findings pointed to the power of future-thinking interventions: for example, asking people to write a letter for a child to read years from now. Such techniques, the study found, are effective at motivating people to change their behavior.

For Falk, the takeaway is both practical and urgent: “We have the technology to build a better climate future. We need to help people see the possibilities for working toward change together.” 

Banet-Weiser is thrilled with Falk’s dedication to climate action in her research and in her vision for the school: “I asked Emily to make climate action a central part of her leadership,” she says. “Understanding how to inspire climate action isn't just an academic exercise; it is one of the most important questions of our time, and one that Annenberg is uniquely equipped to answer. Our faculty and researchers are already making huge strides in addressing the climate crisis, whether that’s FactCheck.org countering climate misinformation, the Polarization Research Lab tracking Americans’ opinions on the issue, or research teams in the Annenberg Public Policy Center working to understand what shapes people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.”

Empowering Community

Last spring, with support from the Vice Dean’s office, Annenberg’s many postdoctoral fellows gathered at a colloquium to share their research and make connections, a gathering designed to make connections across research networks. In her opening remarks, Falk noted that the most impactful research often emerges from the intersection of different disciplines, communities, and minds, pointing out that discussions between early-career scholars “have the potential to shape new ideas, new collaborations, and new directions of research here at Annenberg and to define the field.”

Falk sees her role as shining a light on discoveries, opening doors for researchers, and building the infrastructure that allows bold ideas to flourish. Whether she is teaching a class, mentoring graduate students, leading a faculty discussion, or designing a new research study, she is guided by the same conviction: that research, done together, can meaningfully change the world.