A long-standing tradition since 1998, the annual Scheidel lecture honors Professor Thomas Scheidel’s lifetime of scholarship, teaching, and academic leadership by bringing distinguished scholars to the UW Department of Communication to meet and engage with faculty and students who are pursuing advanced studies in communication. We are delighted to present our 2026 speaker, Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson.
In this lecture, Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson argues that scientists and science communicators would be well served by use of a “mental models” approach to simultaneously increase consequential knowledge and reduce public susceptibility to misconceptions about controversial climate and health findings. By engaging audiences with visual, verbal, or animated models, this approach creates understandings of science on which the audience can draw to recognize and reject consequential misconceptions.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Director of the University’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, and the cofounder of the fact-checking site FactCheck.org and its science subsite, SciCheck.
In 2020, the National Academy of Sciences awarded Jamieson its Public Welfare Medal for her “non-partisan crusade to ensure the integrity of facts in public discourse and development of the science of scientific communication to promote public understanding of complex issues.”
In 2023, Jamieson was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences, and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. She also is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the AAAS, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Communication Association.
Please join us on April 1st at 6:00pm. RSVPs are required to attend this free event.