Carla Fisher, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications (UFCJC) Advertising associate professor, will leave UFCJC on June 30 to join UF’s College of Medicine as a tenured associate professor in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics.

Fisher, who has been a member of the UF Health Cancer Center and affiliate faculty at the Center for Arts in Medicine since arriving at UF in 2016, will join the College of Medicine’s Health Outcomes and Implementation Science team. The team’s mission focuses on bringing scientific evidence into clinical practice and the community to improve population health and achieve health equity.

While at UF, Fisher has built family-centered supportive-care resources for patients, caregivers and families coping with acute and chronic illness, particularly those facing cancer at various phases of the lifespan, from adolescence to later adulthood. She will continue to develop and implement family-centered, developmentally targeted cancer interventions that also aim to reduce health disparities with underserved populations of patients and family caregivers.

She has produced 100 peer-reviewed publications, including two books. Her sole authored book, “Coping Together Side by Side…,” was awarded the National Communication Association’s (NCA) 2018 Communication & Aging Division Outstanding Book Award and is the first evidence-based book providing developmentally targeted guidance to help mothers and daughters coping with breast cancer at various points in the lifespan.

Fisher has been awarded more than $800,000 in grants as principal investigator and more than $11 million as a co-investigator from federal and private funders, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, Department of Defense, and The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. At UF, she’s been recognized for her research with the 2018 CJC Faculty Research Award and the 2017 UF Research Excellence Award.

Fisher created and led the Family·Health·Lifespan Communication Lab, whose central mission is to produce research that helps families engage in healthy communication practice at home and in the clinical setting. As part of her lab, she led research funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and was an active scientist in the NCI-NIEHS funded Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Program. She’s been an expert consultant for the NIH, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Office on Women’s Health.

Across her career, Fisher has mentored more than 60 predoctoral students, both at UFCJC and across colleges, and was the adviser of eight UFCJC Ph.D. candidates. Her CJC Ph.D. advisees have attained industry research positions, faculty appointments, as well as cancer center post-doc fellowships, including one at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in addition to receiving research distinction awards and grants, including an NCA Dissertation Award.

In addition to her teaching and research, Fisher developed the College’s specialization in Health Communication at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, and developed and managed both the Health Communication and Science Communication graduate certificates (15 students will have completed the certificate since it launched two years ago in fall 2020). She also created and managed two undergraduate health-related communication courses offered every semester and mentored 10 doctoral students in teaching the courses so they could gain experience in their area of specialization.

Prior to joining UF, Fisher had been a faculty member at George Mason University and Arizona State University. She received her bachelor’s degree from the Florida Institute of Technology, a master’s from Arizona State University and her Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University.

Posted: June 27, 2023
Category: College News, Fisher Lab, Health Communication News
Tagged as: Advertising, Carla Fisher, UF College of Medicine Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics