Congrats to the 2025-2026 Graduates!

The department extends congratulations to all those students who have graduated from one of our programs this past year. We had approximately 200 students complete degrees—many of them walking across the stage at one of several ceremonies on campus honoring graduates May 8-9, 2026. We also recognized our traditional Ph.D. and Master’s students at our annual Honors Day in the department.

What follows is a listing of all CMS graduates who have not withheld their names (plus dissertation and thesis titles for those students in our traditional graduate programs).

Ph.D.

• Maya Blitch (Spring 2026). Acts of Love and Fights for Resilience: Families’ Organizing Through Natural Disasters
• Olivia Gellar (Spring 2026). In Plain Sight: Noxious Rhetoric and the Architecture of White Supremacist Recruitment
• Abigail Hazlett (Spring 2026). ‘Everyone’s a Little Autistic”: Communication Work and (Dis)Enfranchisement in the Late-in-Life Autism Identification Process
• Jamie Jelinek (Summer 2026): Life After Artifice: Necro-Politics and the Revelation of Humanhood in the Face of AI
• Emily Rapier (Fall 2025): Affective and Behavioral Reactions to Close Others’ Expressions of Concern for Mental Health
• Audrey Shaffer (Spring 2026). Family Communication Patterns and Technology and Face-to-Face Integration Behaviors in Parent-College Student Relationships
• Mackenzie Shekar (Spring 2026). Care, Sustainability, and Supply Chains: A Communicative Relational Framework
• Sha Sun (Spring 2026). Communicating ‘Acceleration’ in the Fast-Fashion Supply Chain: A Spatiotemporal Lens on Fluid Organizations
• Yohanna Tesfai (Spring 2026). Shaping Tomorrow with Yesterday: The Temporal Structuring of Organizational Memory.
• Jacinta Tran (Summer 2026). ‘There’s No Playbook, But it Comes From the Heart’: Disclosure Decision-Making Model for Family Caregivers of Aging Parents
• Fan Wang (Spring 2026). Communicative Numeracy in Type 2 Diabetes: Scale Development with Evidence of a Buffering Effect
• Kross Wen (Spring 2026). Media and Memorable Messages: Beyond Traditional Barriers to Organ Donation in Contemporary China
• Meenakshi Yadav (Spring 2026): Caste as Communication: Autopoiesis, Rupture, and Anti-Caste Worldmaking

Master’s

• Emaly Aguilar (Spring 2026). Spanish Speakers and Understanding the Impact of Conveying Crisis Communication on Facebook
• Ahiri Chakraborty (Spring 2026). Behind-the-screens: Understanding Employee Experiences of Openness, Privacy, and Visibility in Organizational Collaboration Technologies
• Emily Felt (Spring 2026). ‘This is Just Kind of How it Is to Be a Woman’: How Patients’ Interaction Goals and Norms of Trust Shape Communication in their First Gynecological Appointment
• Eleni Mercer (Spring 2026): Legislated Body: Systemic Erasure of the Term Transgender in Anti-Trans State Bills
• Morgan Peterson (Summer 2026). Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ACC): The Effects of Attempted Family Support in Social Situations on People with Delayed Communication
• Victoria Salinas (Spring 2026). ‘Living as a Threesome: Me, Him, and Depression’: Nondepressed Romantic Partners’ Perspectives on Communal Coping Regarding their Depressed Partners’ Chronic Symptoms of Depression – A Qualitative Study
• Jianhao Wei (Spring 2026). Open of Hidden? Exploring Visibility in the Open-Source Software Community on Github
• Monica Williams (Spring 2026). A Seat at the Table: Rhetorics of Difference and Sustainability for Black Identities and Landscapes in the Case of Memphian Resistance and xAI

Option III Graduates

• Taiba Azeem
• Cole William Bott
• Daniella A. Denicola
• Brett Aaron Haden
• Sophia M. Jacobs-Townsley
• Amy Michaela Kingston
• Yaqing Li
• Aaliyah Arie Moore
• Grace Mackie Muir
• Ari Alexa Rodriguez
• Sebastian P. Sanchez
• Miles David Schuk Ehler 

• Yanlan Zhang

   

Bachelor’s (Undergraduate)