At the 2008 ICA Annual Members Meeting in Montreal, Canada, on May 24, 2008, the ICA Fellows added six new members to its ranks. Fellow status in ICA is primarily a recognition of distinguished scholarly contributions to the broad field of communication. The primary consideration for nomination to Fellow status is a documented record of scholarly achievement. Secondary consideration is given to such criteria as service to the International Communication Association and socially or professionally significant service to other publics such as business, government, education, etc.

The 2008 ICA Fellows are:

Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Professor of Communication, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California.

Sandra Ball-Rokeach is coauthor with Melvin DeFleur of the canonical text Theories of Mass Communication along with half a dozen other authored, coauthored and edited books on media violence, audiences and social structures. Her work on the Great American Values test is well known throughout the social sciences. She has pursued various research studies on how media influence the values and behaviors of their audiences, social groups and societies. In short, she has been a prolific scholar in our field. Sandra's current research examines urban communication flows and the manner in which urban citizens use networks and mass media to connect themselves to their communities, both local and global. This work on communication infrastructure reconceptualizes the traditional view of social structure into a new perspective emphasizing the role of communication structure. The hallmark of these studies, as with all of her research, is that it is theoretically rich and empirically carefully conducted. She is a model of the behavioral research stream in our field. Sandra has given considerable service to the communication discipline as coeditor of Communication Research in the 1990s, as chair of the mass communication division of ICA, and as a member of many ICA committees. Sandra has received both Fulbright and Rockefeller Fellowships and is an elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association.

Brant R. Burleson, Professor of Communication, Purdue University.

The major focus of Brant Burleson's scholarly work has been on the role that communication plays in the provision of social support. His early work was concerned with the role that individuals' cognitive complexity and perspective taking skills played in promoting a variety of social interaction outcomes. More generally this seminal work explores the conditions under which comforting is expressed in different cultures by and towards different kinds of people. Brant has shown that social support has variable manifestations in a plethora of important relational and applied contexts. Further, he has demonstrated how and why recipients of comforting interpret and react to it in distinctive ways and, how, in turn, these produce various health-related outcomes and coping strategies. Brant has published over 100 articles in leading communication and related social science journals. His 2003 Handbook of Communication and Social Interaction Skills (with John O. Greene) is a monumental work in this domain of communication research. Brant edited the ICA Communication Yearbook from 1995 to 1997 and has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Communication and Human Communication Research. He also edited the influential Progress in Communication Sciences book series from 1989 to 1991. In multiple studies he has been ranked among the top 25 most prolific researchers in the field of communication.

Jesse G. Delia, Professor of Communication, Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Jesse Delia has published more than 60 important scholarly articles animated by the constructivist perspective. His early research in language and speech production was innovative, trend setting, and launched a tradition of studying children's communication practices in larger contexts that brought together interpersonal and mediated communication settings. His work on cognitive complexity and constructivism represents one of the major lines of work in the field. One of many generalizations growing out of this extensive research program is that individuals who construe others in more complex ways are better able than their less complex counterparts to devise messages that take into account the perspectives of others, which in turn, is associated with the production of more sophisticated and effective messages. Jesse's work also has been influential because it stimulated interpretive research throughout the entire communication field. It became the foundation for research on comforting and social support, on message design logics, and on person-centered communication, among others. Jesse is a pioneer of the communication field who helped to set the standards for social science research during its first great growth period. Jesse's published history on the field of communication and ICA has been required reading for new doctoral students for years. Jesse has been a deeply involved member of ICA's Interpersonal and Small Group Communication Divisions. He is the recipient of many ICA top three paper awards, received the NCA Career Achievement Award, and was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship.

Jon F. Nussbaum, Professor of Communication, Pennsylvania State University.

Jon Nussbaum is a pioneer in the study of intergenerational communication and communication across the life span. What makes Jon's career so significant is his leadership in carving out new domains of scholarship by expanding the horizons of health, family, and interpersonal communication. Prior to the 1980s very few scholars focused on communication with the elderly. Most scholars treated it as an audience-level variable that had no theoretical value for the field. However, as knowledge accumulated about communication across generations it became apparent that adolescents and the elderly were not simply different communication targets. Jon's work began to generate fundamental constructs that depicted patterns of communication across generations, ones that contributed to development of an arena of communication study on the life span. Although initially aligned with interpersonal communication, communication across the life span now infuses research in health communication, media studies, and technology. Jon's early research spurred this work and led to the development of this arena of communication studies. Jon has served ICA as editor of Journal of Communication and more recently as ICA President. He also has represented ICA well to the larger academic community as President of the International Society of Language and Social Psychology, and as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.

Patti M. Valkenburg, Professor of Child and Media Research, University of Amsterdam.

Patti Valkenburg's main area of scholarship is youth and the media. She has published more than 50 articles in English and another 17 in Dutch peer reviewed journals in the areas of media ratings, advertising effects, children's attraction to programs, media and fear, parental mediation, media and creativity, and responses to news. Her latest and most influential work deals with youth and the Internet. Valkenburg pioneered a comprehensive, interdisciplinary research program on the social implications of the Internet, including computer games, exposure to sex, identity games, online communication, and parental meditation. Her research is highly original, demonstrates exceptional application of methodological skills, and provides extremely valuable, empirically grounded new understandings into the role of various media in children's lives. Valkenburg's service contributions to the discipline are exemplary as well. She has been Chair of ICA's Instructional/Developmental Division and most recently was founder and chair of a new Interest Group on Children, Adolescents and the Media. She has been a member of several ICA committees including the Nominations Committee and the Research Committee. Patti was the first communication scholar to be awarded a major grant (five-year, 1.25 million Euro) by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, a highly competitive award given only to the most outstanding scholars. Patti was also honored in 2006 as the most prolific communication scholar in Europe.

Barbara J. Wilson, Professor of Communication and Head of the Communication Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Barbara Wilson has established a distinguished line of research on children and the media as represented by more than 50 published articles and three books, including her highly praised 2002 book Children, Adolescents, and the Media. Much of her research has been guided by the theoretical framework of information processing which assumes that changes in cognitive skills during development have profound effects on children's emotional reactions to media. Her work has focused on the identification of content themes, production techniques, and types of characters that produce adverse responses in children, such as fright and distress. She has studied these across different kinds of programming, including television news and family situation comedies with respect to targeted events, like kidnappings and displays of weapons. Her work is noteworthy for careful conceptualizations, often novel methods, and elegant analysis and has enlarged our understanding of the developmental differences in how children make sense of and react to television portrayals. Barb has served ICA well as chair of the Instructional/Developmental Communication Division, as a member of several ICA committees, and as board member on most of ICA's journals. She has also represented the communication discipline well in outside venues. She has garnered more than three million dollars in grants to fund her research, and has been invited to address many diverse audiences around the world, including oncologists, broadcasters, teachers, parent-teacher associations, criminal justice professionals and school superintendents.