Kathryn Thier

Kathryn Thier

Assistant Professor of Communication, Department of Communication

Contact Information

Office Location: Robison 25, Becton College

Courses

• Health Misinformation
• Psychology of Communication
• Professional Communication for the Health Professions; Public Speaking

Research

• Health Communication
• Health Misinformation
• Climate Communication
• Solutions Journalism
• Media Effects
• Quantitative Methodology

Education

• BA, Brown University
• MS, Columbia University
• PhD, University of Maryland

Academic Profile

Kathryn Thier, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She joined FDU in 2025 to create health communication courses across disciplines in support of the university’s FDUHealth initiative.

She has earned research awards from the International Communication Association and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, as well as held leadership positions in both. She serves as an Associate Editor for the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Communication.

Prior to joining FDU, she was a Research-to-Practice Postdoctoral Fellow at George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, largely focusing on how messages about the climate-health connection encourage climate action.

Before earning her PhD, she taught journalism and public relations for six years at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, where she co-founded The Catalyst Journalism Project, a research and teaching collaborative focused on the intersection of solutions and investigative journalism. She also directed the Charles Snowden Program for Excellence in Journalism, a donor-funded journalism internship program open to all university students in the state of Oregon.

In her professional career, she was a reporter for Newsday and The Charlotte Observer for several years, as well as an in-house public relations professional.