Annie Lang, Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University, was selected to receive the prestigious 2009 Steven H. Chaffee Career Productivity Award. The Award recognizes a scholar, or small group of collaborating scholars, for sustained work on a communication problem over a long period of time. The committee that selects the award recipient gives preference to original work that is conceptually rich and makes an advance in communication knowledge. The research must have comprised multiple projects and publications and generated second-generation work among students and other scholars.
"Annie Lang has sustained a significant line of work for 20 years that has made an important contribution to our understanding of media effects," said the Chaffee Award Subcommittee of the ICA Research Awards Committee. "Her work has also had significant implications for the design of media messages. Further, it has introduced new methods for inquiry in the area.
"She has a strong and sustained publication record in top general and specialist journals in our field," the subcommittee added. "she is an ICA Fellow and has won many ICA top paper and other awards. It is clear that she has influenced many other scholars, both students and colleagues, and younger scholars are continuing from the base she has laid down. Overall, she is an outstanding scholar and meets all the criteria for the Chaffee Award."
Dr. Lang, who received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1987, focuses on the cognitive processing of media messages, with the long-term goal of better understanding the interplay among parts of the dynamic system comprised of the embodied mind and the mediated message. She teaches in these areas, and also works with students and advisees in the laboratory at the Institute for Communication Research.
The Steven H. Chaffee Career Productivity Award, which carries a $1,000 prize and a commitment to present the work at the 2010 ICA Conference in Singapore, was presented to Dr. Lang on May 23, 2009 during ICA's 59th Annual International Conference in Chicago, Illinois, USA.
