Faculty
Janelle Applequist
Associate Professor, Advertising and Public Relations, Director of Internships and Concentration Head, Integrated Public Relations and Advertising, Associate Director, Center for Sustainable Democracy, College of Arts and Sciences
CONTACT
Office: CIS 3099
Email
bio
Janelle Applequist (Ph.D., M.A., Penn State University) is an Associate Professor of Advertising and Public Relations at the Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications at the 51在线.
Dr. Applequist was recently nominated by USF President Rhea Law as the sole junior scholar (across the University system) for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program. This distinguished program was established in 2015 to provide philanthropic support to extraordinary scholars for high-caliber research in the humanities and social sciences.
She is the author of Broadcast pharmaceutical advertising in the United States: Primetime pill pushers and co-author of CTE, media, and the NFL: Framing a public health crisis as a football epidemic (2016 and 2019, Lexington Books). Her educational training and continued research trajectory have provided her with the skills and knowledge necessary to execute large- and small-scale integrated marketing communications campaigns focused on health. She has a broad background in the field of mass communications, with specific training and expertise in qualitative research methods.
Her primary area of publications directly address the pharmaceutical advertising industry and best practices for successful messaging. She investigates the ways in which patients respond to these advertisements, using mixed-methods analytical approaches, and has been successful in more recently applying these principles to the related areas of health equity and social determinants of health.
Since 2019, Dr. Applequist has served as an Academic Consultant on the Patient Engagement Advisory Committee for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where she is able to attend various hearings and meetings in Washington, D.C. to provide her expertise on the following topics: agency guidance and policies, clinical trial or registry design, patient preference study design, benefit-risk determinations, device labeling, unmet clinical needs, available alternatives, patient reported outcomes and device-related quality of life or health status issues, and other patient-related issues. In 2021, she was chosen as one of seven panelists to present her research to the FDA鈥檚 Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (with 600+ attendees) for their workshop titled The Future of Prescription Drug Promotion and Digital Marketing. In 2023, she was chosen as one of four panelists to present to the FDA鈥檚 Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and Office of Drug Promotion (with 700+ attendees) for their workshop titled Informing and Refining the Prescription Drug Promotion Research Agenda.
Her secondary area of research emphasizes the broader field of health communication, focusing on the interdisciplinary nature of mass and interpersonal communications. In working as a lead- or co-researcher on numerous studies, she has been able to successfully navigate the intersectionality of applying mass communications principles to physician-centric stakeholder adoption of innovative policy-based health infrastructure changes.
Dr. Applequist has been published in multiple outlets, including Journal of Medical Internet Research, Patient Education and Counseling, Annals of Family Medicine, Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, BMC Medical Research Methodology, Journal of Health Communication, Qualitative Health Research, Journal of Interactive Advertising, and others.
For a review of her work, welcomed collaboration opportunities, or media requests, please visit her .
EDUCATION
- Ph.D. in Mass Communications (Penn State University)
- M.A. in Media Studies (Penn State University)
- B.A. in Journalism & Psychology minor (Penn State University)
TEACHING AREAS
Advertising, pharmaceutical advertising, and qualitative research methods
research specializations
Health communication, health policy, and health and political polarization