I'd like to tell you a little bit about who I am and my vision for our association. My hopes for ICA emphasize the "I" - international. I've been a member of and active in ICA since the mid-70s. I've chaired the Task Force on Professional Development for Women (1987-1993) and the Nominations Committee (2000-2001), and served three years on the Publications Committee (2003-2006), chairing it during my last year. I've also been active in NCA since the mid-70s and served as the President of the Tri-State (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware) Communication Association from 1982 to 1984. This included planning two conferences. I've taught at the universities of Delaware and Dayton; I'm currently Professor of Communication at the latter. I've taught in London on three occasions and Rome on one. I'll be teaching in Shanghai during the summer of '08. I speak some Italian and am learning Mandarin Chinese. Awards have included several top paper awards, the Alumni Award in Teaching at the U of Dayton, the ICA/NCA Health Communication Distinguished Book Award, and serving as the U of Dayton College of Arts and Sciences Scholar-in-Residence.

I have published six books, including the Handbook of Health Communication and the Handbook of Communication and People with Disabilities, 34 journal articles, 25 book chapters, and 4 encyclopedia entries, and presented 70 conference papers, going back to the very first ICA undergraduate honors conference in 1975. I have edited the international journal Health Communication since its inception in 1987. My years as an editor have had a strong impact on how I look at our field and the encouragement of scholarship and professional development within it. I see my editorial role as also being a mentoring role. This is especially true with non-U.S. and young scholars. Rather than using the reviewing process to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, I see it as an opportunity to encourage the development and refinement of scholarship in our field. I've seen work that was originally unacceptable to reviewers ultimately contribute important new insights. I see reviewing and editing as a responsibility to the broader domain of scholarship - we contribute to research not only through the work that we individually conduct, but through the feedback and guidance we provide to others as reviewers and editors.

This focus on mentoring also describes the approach that I would bring to helping to lead ICA. I will try to continue in the tradition of many past leaders who have served to mentor and nurture our field. I think that such mentoring is especially necessary with younger and non-U.S. scholars, who frequently suffer only because they have been trained in different ways than have U.S. scholars. As member and then chair of the ICA publications committee, I worked to try to encourage our journals to be more open to different theoretical, methodological, and stylistic approaches to the study of communication. The initiatives that I would propose for ICA would build on this foundation. Research should not be rejected from an ICA journal because it is not written in the style typically used by U.S. scholars, for example, and I would try to put an end to the practice. These initiatives would function to not only increase the internationalization of our association, but would further function to mentor all potential scholars in our field. Such activities eventually impact membership numbers and conference participation, as well. Most importantly, this encouragement of diverse approaches leads to a better understanding of communicative processes.

I'd also like to see ICA do more to encourage and recognize mentoring efforts. Most universities don't formally recognize mentoring in tenure and promotion or merit assessments, but might be encouraged to do so if the association provided more recognition of it. In addition to providing much more recognition for and rewarding of mentoring efforts, I believe that people need to both learn how to mentor and how to be mentored. We can provide mentor/mentee training; mentoring has to be learned like any other skill. I'd like to see an ICA Task Force that focuses on how we can encourage mentoring efforts. I also think that our editors and reviewers could, in some instances, use some guidance on how to approach editing in a mentoring capacity. I'd like to see some consistent training and feedback provided for our editors and reviewers on how to do the job well. There's great variability in the quality of such efforts.

ICA has made good progress in encouraging the dissemination of our research in recent years, but I think that more could be done to get findings to the people who need them. This goes beyond accessibility and visibility issues, and moves into publicity. Under recent Presidents, ICA has increased publicity efforts, but I would work to formalize and encourage this even more. There's an art to such dissemination that's harder to master than the research skills that we all acquired in graduate school. We need to utilize those who have these skills and the necessary connections. Members of our field are doing wonderful research with important real-world implications - we need to make sure that those implications are realized.

My efforts on behalf of ICA would also focus on encouraging nominations for our various awards, recruiting an editor for our newsletter, increasing membership, especially amongst students, expanding the new web site to include social networking components, and collaborating with other communication associations around the world. I'd like us to do some fundraising to pay off our building and free money for other projects. Most importantly, I'd like to see us make further strides toward internationalizing our association. In addition to making our journals more accessible to non-US scholars I think we need to continue our efforts to make conferences attractive and affordable.

I've appreciated the opportunity that ICA has provided for me in the past to give back to the field that has nurtured me. I'd like to continue these efforts in the capacity of ICA President-Elect-Select.