Congratulations to Associate Professor Robert Bond for winning the 2022 Mattox Research Award. The Sarah Evan Mattox Faculty Research endowment provides support for a faculty member’s research based on articles on “the impact of media on public opinion and/or society,” published throughout the year. 

The Mattox Research award is highly competitive and goes to a productive, innovative faculty member. Research area examples include media effects, media entertainment, public opinion, political communication, advertising, public affairs journalism, strategic communication, health communication and communication technology. 

The school director appoints a committee to determine the winner of the award. The committee considers the relevance to the purpose of the Mattox endowment as well as the creativity, productivity, scholarly and/or social impact of the candidate’s articles. As the 2022 winner, Bond receives $12,000 in award funds to spend on research projects within the next two years. 

Bond’s publications include: 

• Yue Li and Robert M. Bond. Examining semantic (dis)similarity in news through news organizations’ ideological similarity, similarity in truthfulness, and public engagement on social media: A network approach. Human Communication Research (published online 2022).

• Hillary Shulman, Matthew Sweitzer, Jason Coronel, Olivia Bullock, Shannon Poulsen, and Robert M. Bond. Predicting Vote Choice and Election Outcomes from Ballot Wording: The Role of Processing Fluency in Low Information Direct Democracy Elections. Political Communication 39 (5): 652-673 (2022).

• Matthew Osborne, Sam Malloy, Erik Nisbet, Robert M. Bond, and Joe Tien. Sentinel node approach to monitoring online COVID-19 misinformation. Scientific Reports 12:9832 (14 June 2022).

• Yue Li and Robert M. Bond. Evidence of the persistence and consistency of social signatures. Applied Network Science 7(10): 1-19 (2022).

• Tasleem J. Padamsee, Robert M. Bond, Graham N. Dixon, Shelly R. Hovick, Kilhoe Na, Erik C. Nisbet, Duane T. Wegener, and R. Kelly Garrett. Changes in COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Among Black and White Americans. JAMA Network Open 5 (1): e2144470 (2022).

• Robert M. Bond, and Matthew D. Sweitzer. Political homophily in a large-scale online communication network. Communication Research 49 (1): 93-115 (2022).

• Robert M. Bond. Social Network Determinants of Screen Time among Adolescents. The Social Science Journal 59 (2): 236-251 (2022).

• Austin Hubner and Robert M. Bond. I Am A Scientist... Ask Me Anything: Examining differences between male and female scientists participating in a Reddit AMA session. Public Understanding of Science 31 (4): 458-472 (2022).