Joshua B. Barbour (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is an associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Health Communication, a collaboration between the Moody College of Communication and Dell Medical School. He founded the Automation Policy and Research Organizing Network (APRON) and directs the APRON Lab. Dr. Barbour studies how organizations design and discipline communication to solve problems. His research focuses on how macromorphic, societal structures complicate communication,  organizing, and how people manage information and make meaning. His current and past projects include engaged scholarship at a toxic waste storage facility, in nuclear power plants, with disaster preparation groups, and in healthcare organizations, settings where communication has important effects and can be a key site of intervention. His current research focuses on understanding the communicative difficulties of data-intensive work in, for example, analytics and automation and developing theory of organizational communication design. His work has appeared in Communication Research, Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, the Journal of Health Communication, the Journal of Applied Communication Research, the Journal of Communication, and Management Communication Quarterly.