Six new faculty and staff members with strong and varied professional and educational backgrounds have joined the ranks in the School of Communications starting in Fall 2008.
New faculty and staff members, in alphabetical order, are:
Mandy Gallagher comes to Elon from Texas Tech University, where she received the Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2006. She’ll begin in the School of Communications as an assistant professor, teaching primarily courses in strategic communications. Before beginning her teaching career, she worked in public relations and advertising in Charlotte. She obtained her master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, and she’s a member of the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and the International Communication Association. She also serves as a reviewer for Journal of Communication Inquiry and Mass Communication and Society.
Linda Gretton will be sharing her 20 years of corporate communications and investor/public relations experience in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and aerospace industries with Elon students in the fall. Gretton, an instructor in the School of Communications, also worked one year as business reporter for Triad Business News. She won the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Association for Business Communication for her UNCG dissertation project titled, “The Rhetorical Helix of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industries: Strategies of Transformation through Definition, Description and Ingratiation.” She received her master’s degree from Northeastern University and her bachelor’s from Boston University.
Maggie Mullikin arrived at Elon in the spring term as the communications interim internship director and now serves as the assistant coordinator of internships and graduate program in the School of Communications. She received her bachelor’s degree from James Madison University and then taught primary grades for six years in the Dominican Republic and New York. She began a career in marketing working for an event planner and an educational awareness company in Washington, D.C. During the last seven years, she has been in front of the camera as talent for a Greensboro modeling agency. Some of her work includes national ad campaigns, Web advertisements, voice-overs, print media and television commercials. Mullikin most recently wrote and taught a social growth program for elementary schools in Guilford County.
Nagatha Tonkins was named the 2008 Journalism Educator of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists, but that’s only one of her many accomplishments. Tonkins, the new director of internships and an assistant professor, recently served as internship director and department sequence coordinator in the Journalism and Mass Communication Department at North Carolina A&T State University, where she also earned her master’s degree. She has served as project director and organized the Broadcast Short Course for NABJ for 16 years and as project director for Hearst Argyle Television’s News Leadership Symposium for two years. She has also participated in fellowships, internships and faculty seminars with the Advertising Education Foundation, Poynter Institute, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Black College Communication Association and the American Press Institute. In her professional career, she worked as news reporter and morning anchor for WGHP-TV in High Point, N.C., and as news reporter for WLOE-AM in Eden, N.C.
Nicole Triche has served 10 years in various positions at the University of North Carolina Center for Public Television, including four years as the producer of North Carolina Visions. She has co-directed the Carolina Film and Video Festival from 2005 to 2008, acted as director of the Flicker screening series from 2002 to 2005 and served as a board member of the Southern Documentary Fund. Her films have screened at multiple festivals including Full Frame and RiverRun. She has also worked as an instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Triche, an instructor in the School of Communications, recently earned her master of fine arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Ross Wade is filling a new position in the School of Communications: assistant director of career services. Wade, who earned his master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has six years of combined media experience in television and documentary film and corporate and entertainment industry multimedia production and project management. He also has two years of career services experience and is a National Certified Counselor.