Advanced to Doctoral Candidacy

Rachael Kee successfully advanced to doctoral candidacy in February 2026. Her qualifying exam paper, Beyond the Laboratory: Introducing High-Throughput Communication Science, proposes an integrative research agenda that combines high-throughput, temporally sensitive, and ecologically valid multimodal data streams with Marr’s (1982) tri-level framework to reveal the multilevel and reciprocal causal dynamics inherent to communication theories. The paper offers a roadmap for empirically implementing high-throughput data collection and highlights its broad utility across multiple communication subfields, charting a path forward for better capturing the complex, multilevel, and reciprocal causal mechanisms of human communication.

Her committee was chaired by Dr. Drew Cingel, with Dr. Richard Huskey (Advisor), Dr. Soojong Kim, and Dr. Emorie Beck serving as committee members.