I am an Associate Professor and Associate Department Chair in the English Department at Auburn University where I teach courses in professional and technical communication. More info about our programs can be found here: https://cla.auburn.edu/english/.

I earned my PhD in rhetoric and composition from the University of New Mexico. Before becoming an academic I was a technical writer/editor at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in the department formerly known as Epidemiology and Cancer Control, which directly informs my research. More specifically, my scholarship is situated at the intersections of technical and professional communication, visual rhetoric, and the rhetoric of health and medicine wherein I seek to understand and lend insight into the ways that knowledge about disease, illness, and health are visually constructed, particularly in public health-related contexts.

My 2023 article published in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication applying a wicked problems framework to the creation of yellow fever vaccination maps won the CCCC 2024 Best Article on Philosophy or Theory of Technical or Scientific Communication.

Photo credit: Anna Knecht Schwarzer; Site last updated: August 2026