Chanele Cox
Online Academic Adviser
Chanelle Cox learned at an early age that hard work gets noticed, and she thinks putting that into practice guiding students and updating programs led to her being named CJC’s Professional Adviser of the Year in 2024.
Cox, who advises online Advertising students, approaches students with empathy to meet them where they are, teaching them about their academic programs so they understand not only which courses are needed for their degrees but why they are taking them.
“All advisers have different advising philosophies. My philosophy is to try to give students as much information as I can about their programs so they are confident as to what they need to take and how those courses fit into the context of their degrees, and also to help them connect to resources to overcome any barriers they may be experiencing along the way.”
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Juliana Fernandes
Assistant Professor, Advertising Department
Juliana Fernandes has a vast amount of knowledge on how disinformation spreads quickly through social media like Facebook, something she shares when conducting interdisciplinary research that one day could slow that phenomenon.
But to add an expanded perspective on her research, Fernandes has worked with colleagues in the UF Wertheim College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering to study why social media users find disinformation ads so engaging and to develop a framework to investigate influence cues in online texts to detect deception.
She’s shared her expertise and learned in the process. “They have so much Knowledge on how to extract meaningful information from all sorts of content and doing that in an automated fashion,” Fernandes said. “It’s interesting to see other perspectives and how they think about the same problems and questions that we have, but in a very different, applied way.”
She also works with Promise Scholars, first-generation students and those from underrepresented populations. These students “may not have a parent or sibling who can tell them: Don’t take all these crazy classes at once. I make sure they understand that everyone at the university is an ally,” she said.
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Heidi Kirby
Adjunct Lecturer, Online Master’s Program
As instructional designer and lecturer for “The Art of Podcasting” online master’s course, Heidi Kirby brings a special passion for storytelling in the digital age. She encourages her students to explore the ever-evolving world of podcasting to prepare them far beyond a classroom setting.
She started her own podcast, “BLOC (Building Learning and Organizational Culture)” as a marketing effort for a small startup, but it quickly evolved into a much larger platform. With over 30,000 downloads across 100 countries, Kirby uses her platform to share meaningful conversations within the learning and development industry.
“The Art of Podcasting” teaches students how to develop their target audience persona, plan episodes, design logos, record interviews and everything in between. Students get an overall understanding of what goes on behind the podcasting scenes. At the end of the semester, students have a fully developed podcast trailer, which has been proven to be helpful in securing them post-graduate opportunities.
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Yu-Hao Lee
Associate Professor, Media Production, Management, and Technology/Director of Research for the Center for Public Interest Communications
Yu-Hao Lee left an award-winning career in journalism to pursue research that would explore innovative ways of telling complex stories. His interests gravitated to how emerging technologies could be used for more effective storytelling.
Unlike many technology scholars, he’s not interested so much in the technology itself but more about how humans react to changes in technology, particularly related to social change. In one recent collaboration with a professor in Taiwan, he studied cross-cultural communication in the metaverse for Meta. For the Center for Public Interest Communications, Lee explores issues like affordable housing, basic income policies and communicating health information to rural communities.
“I think CJC is the perfect place to experiment with these ideas,” said Lee, the College’s Outstanding Doctoral Mentor in 2024. “I want to do solid, rigorous research but also see how they play out in practice. That balance between theory, research and practice and professional training here allows me to work with people who have different expertise and also test a lot of these ideas.”
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Houston Wells
Senior Lecturer, Media Production, Management, and Technology
Working with students from their introductory classes to their senior documentary-making course, Houston Wells ensures all students are engaged and participating — whether they want the attention or not.
It’s just one reason Wells was named Faculty Mentor of the Year in 2024. “As an instructor and faculty member, I sometimes reflect on my own experiences and how easy it was to feel anonymous,” said Wells, who earned his bachelor’s and two master’s from UF. “You’re one of dozens of students in a class, so it’s very easy to sort of feel like you are slipping under the radar a bit. I try not to let any of my students feel that way.”
He not only helps them with their coursework — he also provides them with career guidance. “It’s a big scary world out there when you’re getting ready to graduate and it’s nice to have somebody to bounce ideas off of, who’s in your corner and has confidence in your abilities.”
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