Advisory Board
Dr. Vincent Covello
Dr. Covello is the founder and Director of the Center for Risk Communication in New York, NY. He is nationally and internationally recognized trainer, researcher, consultant and expert in crisis, conflict, change and risk communications. He has held numerous positions in academia and government, including Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences and Clinical Medicine at Columbia University. Prior to his joining the faculty at Columbia, Dr. Covello was a senior scientist at the White House Council on Environmental Quality in Washington, D.C., a Study Director at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences and the Director of the Risk Assessment Program at the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Timothy Coombs
Timothy Coombs (PhD from Purdue University in Public Affairs and Issues Management) has held the Abell Endowed Professorship in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He has received the 2002 recipient of Jackson, Jackson & Wagner Behavioral Science Prize from the Public Relations Society of America, the 2013 Pathfinder Award from the Institute of Public Relations in recognition of his research contributions to the field and to the practice, and the 2014 Business Impact Award from the Association for Business Communication and USC Marshall School of Business, Center for Management Communication. Dr. Coombs has won multiple PRIDE awards from the Public Relations Division of the National Communication Association for both books and research articles and was selected for the prestigious Arthur W. Page Society.
Dr. Coombs was a Fulbright Scholar in Estonia in the Spring of 2013. In the Fall of 2013, he was the named NEMO Professor at Lund University, Helsingborg Campus. In 2015 he was
invited to lecture at Tsinghua University, Beijing China. From 2015 to 2020 he was designated an honorary professor in the Department of Business Communication at Aarhus University. He is the past editor for Corporation Communication: An International Journal.
Dr. W. Timothy Coombs’ primary research focuses on crisis communication.
In 1995, he published the first article that would lead to the articulation of the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT). SCCT is recognized as one of the most influential theories in crisis communication. His work has been at the forefront of establishing crisis communication as an identifiable research field within corporate communication. The recognition of his expertise is reflected in the variety of speaking engagements in U.S., Europe, and Asia. He has keynoted at a number of academic and practitioner conferences as well as lecturing on crisis communication at a number of international academic institutions.
