New faculty members include:
Rayvon Fouché will serve as a professor of journalism at Medill with a dual appointment at Northwestern’s School of Communications. Fouché joins Medill from Purdue University where he was the director of the American Studies program. He has authored or edited three books exploring the multiple intersections and relationships between cultural representation, racial identification, and technological design. Fouché has received numerous grants and awards, including those from the Illinois Informatics Institute, National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. Fouché received a BA in Humanities from the University of Illinois, a PhD from Cornell University in the interdisciplinary field of Science & Technology Studies, and completed a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in African and African-American Studies at Washington University.
Fouché’s role will be with a PhD program that is a partnership of Medill, the School of Communication and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. The Rhetoric, Media, and Publics program represents an innovative interdisciplinary collaboration across Northwestern to train future generations of scholars and public intellectuals to address pressing societal issues at the intersections of communication, politics, ethics and journalistic discourse.
A Medill alumna, Carolyn Tang Kmet (MSJ96) will serve as an associate professor of integrated marketing communications at Medill. Tang Kmet joins Medill from the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago, where she taught courses in both marketing and information systems. Her research interests include leveraging geospatial information platforms to connect local needs with local resources. Her efforts helped alleviate the personal protective equipment shortage for health care entities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and provided a prototype by which impoverished communities could independently maximize resources. Prior to this role, she was the CMO with All Inclusive Marketing, a full-service e-commerce agency that provides analytics, marketing and site optimization services for clients such as Southwest Vacations, Julep, and Fire Mountain Gems. Tang Kmet was also the director of affiliate marketing for Groupon, where she helped shape global affiliate marketing strategy. Tang Kmet holds an MBA from Loyola University Chicago, an MSJ from Medill, and a BA from University of California, Berkeley.
Kathy LaTour will serve as a professor in integrated marketing communications. LaTour’s research takes a consumer psychological perspective toward how marketers should approach branding, experience design, communications and loyalty programs. She uses both experimental designs and in-depth interview techniques to better understand consumer behavior. Her major research focus has been on the complexity of human memory. LaTour has been involved with many industry-related projects including consulting with Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Disney and the World Bank.
James Lee joins Medill as an associate professor of journalism with a dual appointment at Northwestern Libraries, serving as an associate university librarian for Academic Innovation. Prior to these roles, Lee was the associate vice provost for digital scholarship and associate dean of libraries at the University of Cincinnati. He also was the director of the Digital Scholarship Center and was associate professor of Digital Humanities. Lee’s research and teaching focus on the areas of digital humanities, machine learning and text mining techniques on historical archives, social network analysis, and data visualization. His research also investigates ways to visualize the results of machine learning algorithms in a human-interpretable way that enables non-technical audiences to glean useful information from the data.
Rafael Matos will serve as a lecturer in integrated marketing communications. His work explores the intersectionality of identities through the use of personal narrative. His research interests bring together corporate communications, cultural studies and technology. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Southern California, and a PhD in Communication Media and Instructional Technology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is the research chair for the Minorities and Communication Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), vice chair of research and scholarship for the Coalition on Men and Masculinities. He is a facilitator and keynote speaker with CAMPUSPEAK.
Ryan Reis is a lecturer in integrated marketing communications. He has helped to build and reinvigorate some of the world’s most recognizable brands. As vice president of marketing at MillerCoors, he led turn-arounds on the company’s two largest brands, Miller Lite and Coors Light. He was previously vice president of field marketing, leading the extensive local marketing team that leverages sports and entertainment properties, media partnerships, and the brewery tour center. As a sales team leader, he won Supplier of the Year honors from Rite Aid. Prior to MillerCoors, Reis worked in brand management and insights for Unilever on some of their largest U.S. brands, such as Suave and Axe. He was a managing consultant for Zyman Group, led by the former CMO of Coca-Cola, for engagements on ConAgra and Nationwide. He began his career working for Nielsen as an onsite consultant at General Mills.
Jeffrey W. Treem will be a professor of Integrated Marketing Communications. His research examines ways that digital technologies alter the visibility of communication in organizational contexts. This scholarship addresses the increased digitalization and datafication of work and the ways these changes transform processes such as employee surveillance, knowledge sharing, and collaboration. His research appears in publications such as Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Human Communication Research, and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. He holds a BS in Communication Studies from Northwestern, an MA in Strategic Public Relations from the University of Southern California, and a PhD in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern.
Jim Berry is an evening news anchor for CBS News Miami. His broadcasting career began at WBTV in Charlotte, North Carolina, as a reporter. He became an anchor/reporter before moving to WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C. There, he anchored and reported news, and hosted a public affairs show before turning his attention to sports. He joined WSVN-TV in Miami as sports director and main sports anchor before being hired by CBS at WBBM-TV in Chicago as a sportscaster. Berry then moved to CBS-owned WFOR-TV in Miami as its main sports anchor and host of Miami Dolphin pregame and postgame shows. Berry is a three-time best of Miami winner with five Emmy Awards. He is a member of the Silver Circle of Excellence in the Suncoast Chapter of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. Over the years, he has been a frequent motivational speaker and supporter of numerous charities that mentor young people.
Casey Bukro pioneered environmental reporting, becoming the nation’s first environment writer for a major newspaper when the Chicago Tribune named him to that post in 1970. Now retired, Bukro will publish a book this year on nuclear energy based on his coverage as a reporter. Bukro also writes an ethics blog about journalism that won the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2015 Sigma Delta Chi award. In 1967, Bukro and fellow Medill alumnus William Jones won the Tribune’s prestigious Edward Scott Beck Award for the groundbreaking “Save Our Lake” series on Great Lakes pollution. Bukro served as the Society of Professional Journalists’ Midwest regional director from 1974 to 1981. He wrote the society’s first code of ethics and served as its national ethics chair. Bukro is a member of the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame.
Sarah L. Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and journalist who reported on the arts, pop culture, society, science and sports for the Washington Post for more than two decades. She is the author of the award-winning nonfiction book The Art of Grace and a contributing author of Balanchine: Celebrating a Life in Dance. She has taught writing and journalism courses at Harvard Extension School, Princeton, American University and other institutions, and is a longtime faculty member of the National Critics Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Kaufman joined the Washington Post in 1994 after working at the Buffalo News and the Arlington Heights Daily Herald. Her work has earned her many awards, including the Criticism and Culture of Ballet Lifetime Achievement Award from the XXIV International Ballet Festival of Miami, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism in 2010.
David Nelson is an associate professor emeritus at Medill. Since retiring from the school in 2012 after teaching for 40 years, he has continued to teach writing to adult professionals at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies. While at Medill, he held several positions, including associate dean, director of graduate studies and chair of the promotion and tenure committee. He helped launch Medill’s Teaching Newspaper program, now known as Journalism Residency, and helped build the Chicago Medill Graduate newsroom at Illinois Center. Before turning his career to teaching, Nelson was a reporter and editor at the Miami Herald, and a writer and editor for Pioneer Press, Time and Money magazines. While in Miami, he created the template for Knight Newspapers, Inc.’s local news coverage. He is a founding member of the New York Times College Advisory Board and served as a management training consultant for the Modern Media Institute (now the Poynter Institute), as well as a senior consultant to AR&D.
CEO and Co-Founder of Tequila Casa Dragones, Bertha González Nieves is an entrepreneur with a career rooted in the luxury consumer goods space. Dedicated to the tequila industry for 25 years, González Nieves is the first certified female Maestra Tequilera by the Academia Mexicana de Catadores de Tequila. Forbes has identified her as “One of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Mexico.” She was also named one of Mexico’s top young businesswomen by Revista Expansión, Mexico’s leading business magazine; “The Most Innovative Women in Food + Drink” by Food & Wine and Fortune; and “The First Lady of Tequila” by the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times calls her “The Spirit Behind High-End Tequila.” In 2022, Revista Quien recognized her as “One of the 50 People Transforming Mexico.” Prior to co-founding Casa Dragones, González Nieves spent more than a decade in leading roles in the tequila industry as well as a consultant at Booz Allen & Hamilton working closely with leading global consumer goods companies.
Emily Ramshaw is the CEO and co-founder of The 19th*, the nation’s first independent nonprofit newsroom at the intersection of gender, politics and policy. The 19th* aims to elevate the voices of women and LGBTQ+ people — particularly those left at the margins of American media — with free-to-consume and free-to-republish daily journalism, newsletters and live events. Ramshaw started her career at The Dallas Morning News, where she broke national stories about sexual abuse inside Texas’ youth lock-ups, reported from inside a West Texas polygamist compound and uncovered “fight clubs” at state institutions for people with disabilities. Prior to The 19th*, Ramshaw was editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, an award-winning local news startup and the largest statehouse news operation in the nation. She is on the board of the Pulitzer Prize where she is serving a nine-year term. In 2020, Ramshaw was named to Fortune’s “40 Under 40” list.
