According to Campbell, it took
an extraordinary opportunity to pull him back to the mainland.
He got an offer he couldn’t refuse, he said: an endowed
research chair at the University of Michigan. It offered him
an opportunity to further pursue his research into the impacts
on individuals and society of new and emerging communication
tools, particularly the cellular phone and related technologies.
Sparr will teach at Michigan as well.
Dr. Steven C. Combs joins the communications faculty at HPU after
spending 12 years at Loyola Marymount University, where he received
numerous teaching awards, was thrice honored by the Who’s
Who Among America’s Teachers (2000, 2004, 2005), and was
twice recognized in the International Directory of Distinguished
Leadership (2000, 2001).
Combs will join HPU in the spring. He taught at Oxford University
this summer and will spend the fall semester as a visiting professor
at Tsuda College in Tokyo, Japan. He has an M.A. from the University
of Kansas, and a B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Southern
California (USC).
Combs has a broad background in communication studies and specializes
in rhetorical theory and criticism. He has presented scholarly
papers on three continents and published in top, peer-reviewed
journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Social Semiotics,
and Argumentation and Advocacy. He was a recent special editor
for a groundbreaking issue of Argumentation and Advocacy devoted
to non-Greco Roman argumentation and has a newly published book
on the subject, The Dao of Rhetoric. He serves on the editorial
board of two communication journals and was recently selected
to the Executive Finance Committee of the American Forensic Association.
Combs is able to draw from his background as an intercollegiate
debater. He set and still holds the record for most victories
in a college career, and he placed second nationally two years
in a row. He enjoys softball and bodysurfing.
Dr. Raymond Abelin’s professional qualifications and academic
credentials reflect interests that span the scientific, business,
and entertainment areas of communication. After graduating from
Beverly Hills High School, he began his career in Hollywood’s
entertainment industry in the 1970s, animating the Speed Buggy,
Jeanie, and original Scooby Doo series for Hanna Barbera Productions.
He was then the company’s youngest animator.
Realizing early on that the university is a primary contributor
to the developmental process of creative communication, Abelin
enrolled in UCLA’s School of Film and Television and earned
the B.A. Magna cum Laude in 1978. In 1979, he enrolled in USC’s
School of Cinema and earned an M.A. in Production in 1983. He
believes he is the first person ever to graduate from both UCLA
and USC production programs.
Abelin returned to the industry as a writer/director, and in
1984 his work gained him acceptance into the Director’s
Guild of America. His sponsor was Richard Donner, director of
Lethal Weapon and Superman. In 1987, during the first and only
industry-wide strike in the union’s history, Arthur Hiller,
president of the DGA and later president of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences, selected Abelin as a negotiator on
the DGA’s Creative Rights Negotiating Committee and helped
develop the successful Guild agreement with the heads of the
major studios.
In 1997, after nearly a decade of computer technologies transforming
production and post-production, Abelin became the first from
the Hollywood filmmaking community to be accepted into Harvard
University’s Graduate School of Design. He did a pioneering
investigation linking narrative design, 3D animation, and the
development of digital cinema, and he received a Master of Design
Studies from Harvard in 1998.
With Web-based communication becoming a global phenomenon, Abelin,
in 2000, enrolled in Cambridge University’s Judge Institute
of Management in 2000. At Cambridge he completed an M.B.A. in
Global Communications Management and emergent media technologies
and was one of the principal developers of Cambridge University’s
first distance-learning initiative, done in collaboration with
Great Britain’s Open University.
While in the United Kingdom, through the Judge Institute of Management,
Abelin also did a major consulting project with the British Broadcasting
Company, examining digital media education and commerce.
In 2003, Abelin completed work for the Ph.D. at the University
of Colorado with dissertation research accomplished through Emmanuel
College, Cambridge. Subsequently, Abelin became chair of Visual
Communication and the Founding Chair of Media Studies at American
Intercontinental University, in Los Angeles, before joining HPU.
Dr. Penny Pence Smith joins the communication faculty as an assistant
professor in public relations this fall. She is a veteran marketing
professional with a current specialization in health care and
medical practices.
In the past three years, she has guided the strategic marketing
for many health-related organizations in North Carolina, including
Wake Radiology, The Aesthetic Institute of North Carolina, The
North Carolina Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention Task Force,
and The North Carolina Committee for Cancer Coordination and
Control.
Smith has also conducted numerous marketing workshops for organizations
such as the American College of Radiology, the American Association
of Nurse Anesthetists, and the American College of Radiology.
She served as co-chair of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Festival
of Women’s Health, a 2,500-square-foot health-education
event at the U.S. Women’s Open Championship in Pinehurst,
N.C. Previously, she developed marketing plans and strategies
for an urgent-care clinic in Honolulu, several insurance companies,
and a developer of nursing homes.
Smith has held a variety of executive positions in the marketing
and communication industries. She was a national director of
Corporate Communication for Grubb & Ellis, one of the two
largest U.S. commercial real estate companies. She has also been
marketing manager of several high technology companies; an account
executive and supervisor for several advertising agencies, including
J. Walter Thompson Company; and founder and CEO of Smith & Shows,
a high technology public relations agency located in Menlo Park,
Calif.
In addition to her work as a marketing and management consultant,
Smith is also a successful journalist, with 10 years as a newspaper
correspondent covering the entertainment industry. From 1971-1975
she served as Bureau Manager for the New York Times Special Features
Syndicate in Los Angeles, and she has authored two successful
books on Hawai‘i.
Smith holds a Ph.D. in Mass Communication Research from the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with an emphasis on health
communication. She earned an M.A. in Communication Management
from the Annenberg School at USC and a B.A. in Communications
from the University of Washington. She has taught marketing strategy
for health care providers at the UNC School of Public Health,
Continuing Education Division.
Minjeong Kim recently earned her Ph.D. in Journalism and Mass
Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. A native Korean, Kim has an M.A. in Journalism and Mass
Communication, also from UNC; an M.A. in International Communication
from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea;
and a B.A. in English from Hankuk Imoversotu.
A new assistant professor in the College of Communication, Kim’s
primary research interests are media law and new media. She is
particularly interested in First Amendment issues in cyberspace.
Her master’s thesis examined online anonymity, and her
doctoral dissertation explored copyright issues in the digital
age.
Kim offers HPU’s College of Communication proficiency in
quantitative research methods. Her professors at UNC have described
her as a “media law major who also understands numbers.” She
has presented numerous papers at academic conferences, including
a second place student paper presented to the Law Division at
the 2004 AEJMC Convention (Association for Education in Journalism
and Mass Communication). She has co-authored several articles
published in academic journals in the United States and in Korea,
and while working on her doctorate at UNC won the John B. Adams
Award for Excellence in Mass Communication Law and the Minnie
S. and Eli A. Rubinstein Research Award.
Kim says she loves traveling around the world learning new things
and meeting new people.
Lew Trusty has been capturing the natural world on film since
the day he was big enough to hold a camera. While working on
an underwater documentary at USC film school, he found that he
enjoyed the challenge of underwater visual communication and
became one of the pioneers exploring and refining specialized
optics and lighting for underwater filming and photography. This
gained him a reputation as one of the country’s preeminent
underwater cameramen and videographers.
Trusty has owned and operated his own production studio in California
and Hawai’i, and he has filmed for companies such as Disney,
National Geographic, Time-Life, Animals-Animals, the National
Wildlife Federation, ESPN, and Baywatch Hawai‘i.
In recognition for his documentary films, Trusty has received
numerous awards including the Cine Golden Eagle, Gold and Bronze
Cindy’s, the Silver Anchor at the Toulon France Maritime
Film Festival, and the Silver Medal from Downunder Australia.
For print media, Trusty has written and produced articles for
major publications in dozens of magazines and periodicals including
National Geographic World, Time Life, Oceans, and the New York
Times. In addition, numerous publishers have used his remarkable
still photography, including Addison Wesley, Beka Books, Harcourt
Brace Jovanovitch, Houghton Mifflin, MacMillan, and many more.
Trusty spends his free time traveling, usually with cases of
cameras. In Hawai‘i he enjoys paddling outrigger canoes
and has competed in the Molokai channel race twice. He is a Deacon
at Central Union Church and a member of The Hawai‘i International
Film Festival (HIFF), the Film and Video Association of Hawai‘i
(FAVAH), and the International Association of Audio Visual Communicators
(IAAVC). |
