After long and distinguished careers in their fields, Research Professor of Communication Alexa Hepburn, Former SC&I Dean and Distinguished Professor of Communication Jonathan Potter, and Associate Professor of Library and Information Science  Nina Wacholder will retire from the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information effective June 30, 2024, the official end of the 2023-2024 academic year.

Research Professor of Communication Alexa Hepburn

Alexa Hepburn is a conversation analyst and discursive psychologist who is interested in how people do things in talk. She has published widely on how to understand everyday interaction, and interaction in child protection and school bullying situations, as well as on developments in discursive and critical psychology.

Alexa Hepburn's research is focused around the use and development of conversation analytic methods, including the notation and analysis of emotional expression within social interaction; the interactional role of interrogatives such as tag questions; parents' strategies for managing their children's behaviour; and the empirical grounding of these interests in everyday interaction.

A major focus is to highlight limitations in more traditional perspectives on emotion and influence, and support applied work in professional-client encounters, such as medical consultations and helpline interactions. She is currently working closely with video materials of family mealtimes and medical and clinical encounters, as well as various types of telephone interaction, and finalizing (with Galina Bolden) a book on transcription for interactional researchers. She also continues to develop and deliver training workshops to various practitioners.

Former SC&I Dean and Distinguished Professor of Communication Jonathan Potter

Jonathan Potter is an enthusiastic and engaged educator with a distinguished record in administration. He enjoys a highly regarded international reputation for his research at the intersection of communication, psychology, and language. Much of his recent work is done in collaboration with Alexa Hepburn, research professor of communication at SC&I.

Potter’s expertise is in the field of discourse studies, with a particular focus on the way careful analyses of interaction can be a route to understanding and reworking basic psychological questions. Throughout his research career, Potter has addressed fundamental issues of theory and method, as well as made substantial research contributions in the area of language and racism, the operation of helplines, and the role of cognition in communication. His 1987 book developed a new way of thinking about social psychology – highlighting the role of communication – and continues to be widely influential. His 1996 book on epistemics, fact construction, and communication also has been heavily cited. He has sat on more than 20 editorial boards, is a member of the Academy of Social Sciences, a Fellow of the International Communication Association, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and an honorary fellow of the TAOS Institute.

Associate Professor of Library and Information Science Nina Wacholder

Nina Wacholder is co-director, with SC&I Associate Dean for Research Mark Aakhus, of SALTS, the Laboratory for the Study of Applied Language Technology and Society. She is also the director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival Archive Project; Rutgers students and recent alumni manage the process and get experience in digital library creation of a unique, high quality resource.

Wacholder’s research interests lie at the intersection of information science, computer science, and linguistics. At a theoretical level, her goal is to understand the impact of properties of human language such as ambiguity and irregularity on the exchange of information among people and between people and computers. At the applied level, her research focuses on using computer technology to improve people’s access to information stored in the form of language.

Current projects include the study of argument mining and argumentation, methodologies for studying human ability to recognize subtle linguistic phenomena and using knowledge about human language behavior to train automatically developed language models; assessment of the quality of index terms as used in electronic indexes and browsing systems, impact of readability of consumer health information on low literacy adults; and development of a theory of query term formulation in the information access process. She has also published on the evaluation of question answering systems, identification of proper names, and anatomical ontologies.

Learn more about the Rutgers School of Communication and Information on the website.