Dale E. Brashers, Ph.D., Professor and Head of the Department of Communication and Professor of Medicine at the University of Illinois, Urbana - Champaign, died unexpectedly on 5 July 2010. Dale had assumed the Chair of the ICA Health Communication Division at the Singapore conference, after planning the Division's panels for the 2009 conference in Chicago and 2010 conference in Singapore. Dale was a prolific and highly-regarded scholar of health communication and his untimely passing is an enormous loss for the Health Communication Division, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the field of communication. He will be long remembered for his gifts as an exceptional researcher and wonderful colleague and friend.
Through his research, Dale made invaluable contributions to health communication, group communication, information seeking and argumentation, and especially to "communication in the management of health and illness" (the title of his forthcoming book coauthored with Deana Goldsmith). He was passionate about the management of uncertainty through communication in health care as it pertained to persons living with HIV/AIDS.
Dale's research was recognized for its excellence. He was named a University Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and received the Distinguished Article Award (2004) from the Health Communication Divisions of ICA and National Communication Association (NCA), the Young Scholar Award for Outstanding Early Career Research from the ICA, the Dennis Gouran Article Award from the Group Communication Division at NCA, the Golden Anniversary Monograph Award from NCA and several top paper awards. His research attracted support from the National Institutes of Mental Health and Nursing Research and the Ameritech Foundation.
Dale was an exceptional and caring teacher and mentor. His legacy is reflected in his numerous doctoral and masters students, many of whom are actively contributing to the health communication discipline. In 2008, Dale received the University of Illinois Campus Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Teaching.
Dale joined the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana - Champaign in 1998. Prior to that, he was on the faculty at Ohio State University (1993-1998) and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1995). Dale received his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Arizona and his master's in interpersonal and organizational communication from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.
Dale was extremely active in communication associations, including ICA. He was past Chair of the Health Communication Division and Group Communication Division in NCA and a past member of several committees in ICA and NCA. He regularly presented papers at communication conferences and served on the editorial boards of many leading journals in communication.
Dale was committed to making a difference in both the academy and the community. He was active in the Urbana - Champaign mental health and HIV/AIDS community. He was a board member for the Mental Health Center of Champaign County, the Greater Community AIDS Project in Champaign, IL, and the Harm Reduction Resource, Champaign, IL.
Dale will be greatly missed by his colleagues, students, Division members, and friends. In his absence, Monique Mitchell Turner has assumed the role of Division Chair for 2010-12. Division members will elect a new Vice Chair in the fall, who will immediately start planning for the 2011 conference in Boston. The Division plans to recognize Dale's contribution to the health communication discipline at the 2011 conference.
