My name is Dr. Lucy Atkinson. I am an Associate Professor in the School of Advertising & PR in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin.

As a scholar of environmental communication, my research agenda sits at the intersection of climate change, health and civic engagement. My focus is on how digital media in its varied forms – from AI-assisted messaging and social media to advertising and virtual reality – can facilitate or hinder individual and collective health and wellbeing. It is solutions-oriented and focuses on developing and evaluating interventions to address issues related to vulnerability, equity and resilience. It is firmly rooted in a normative concern for a well-functioning society and the ways in which communication can serve as a means of both empowering and holding to account governments, corporations, organizations and individuals with respect to the challenges and opportunities around climate change and its impact on health and wellbeing, civic engagement, and equitable, sustainable communities.

I am motivated by questions about how people understand and respond to environmental risks, how these risks disproportionately impact the health and wellbeing of underserved communities, and how science- and technology-driven solutions can engender both intended and unintended consequences. I rely on a mix of quantitative, computational and qualitative methods, including experiments, surveys, natural language processing, generative AI, in-depth interviews and community-based participatory research.

My program of research is highly interdisciplinary. While my disciplinary home is communication, my research brings together the fields of health and medicine, political science, environmental studies, sociology and psychology. I frequently collaborate with faculty outside communication, including in the medical school, environmental science, geology, political science, engineering, architecture, and computer science. The theories I draw on as a framework to explain or predict climate change-related attitudes and behaviors include framing theory, cultivation theory, schema theory, the elaboration likelihood model, moral licensing, feminist theory, and theories of citizenship norms, postmodernism and risk society.

My scholarship has made a significant contribution to the field, appeared in major journals in the discipline, and been supported with grants from the Department of Energy, Meta and Merck, Exxon Mobil, the City of Austin, and the National Science Foundation. My research findings have important theoretical, methodological and managerial implications for how environmental issues are communicated, how audiences process these messages, and how institutions, both public and private, can help support individual and collective health and wellbeing and a sustainable future.

I have been PI or co-PI on grants totaling more than $8M from government and industry sources. These grants support research exploring stakeholder communication around sustainability and climate change issues. Current grants include $7M (as co-PI) from the NSF to explore environmental justice and resilience in underserved communities and $100K (as PI) from the City of Austin to examine multilingual AI-assisted emergency preparedness among underserved communities.

My work has appeared in top-ranked flagship journals, like the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Consumer Behavior, Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising, New Media & Society, Consumption Markets & Culture, International Journal of Consumer Studies, Risk Analysis and Public Relations Review. My research has been covered in international and national news media, including the Guardian (UK) newspaper, the CBC Radio show Ideas, and National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition and On Point with Tom Ashbrook.

In addition to my research, I am the Associate Director of the UT-Austin Global Sustainability Leadership Institute, which trains students to be leaders around issues of environmental communication, responsible innovation, and corporate sustainability. I am also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Health Communication, a senior fellow with the Texas Immersive Institute and a senior faculty research affiliate with the Center for Media Engagement, all in the Moody College of Communication.

I grew up in Toronto, Canada and earned my B.A. in Geography and Latin American-Caribbean Studies from McGill University. I earned my M.A. in Journalism from New York University and worked as a newspaper reporter and editor before pursuing my Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.